REEEP highlighted in UK parliament
London, 14.07.2011 - REEEP International Secretariat
On 14th July, REEEP was mentioned in a UK Parliamentary debate by The Minister for Europe, Mr David Lidington. In answering a question posed by the Hon. Austin Mitchell, Labour MP for the constituency of Great Grimsby, the Minister underlined the character of REEEP and how it differs from the International Renewable Energy Agency (IRENA).
In reply to the question of where IRENA would simply duplicate the work that REEEP is doing, Minister Lidington said: "There is a difference between the two. REEEP is a non-governmental organisation that was established by the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs and the Foreign Office at the Johannesburg summit in 2002 to address the challenges of climate change and energy access in developing countries. Its purpose is to target financing, regulatory and policy barriers to the accelerated development of renewables and energy efficiency technologies, mostly in high-emitting developing countries."
He continued "the key difference between REEEP and IRENA is that whereas IRENA’s purpose is to facilitate the exchange of information and best practice, REEEP is a grant-giving organisation. It exists in order to fund small-scale capacity building projects. It has a secretariat in Vienna that organises that and we and Norway are the main funders of REEEP. The organisations are different yet complementary. If the two were merged or crunched together—I can understand the argument for doing that—we would risk ending up with a bigger organisation with a bigger budget that began to get involved in a greater variety of areas of activity, with a bigger back-office organisation. There is a case, too, for having two carefully defined, lightly governed international organisations, which is what we want to see here."
The full text of the energy-related debate is available here on the Hansard website, the official record of the House of Commons.