ECOTHECH: The Way Forward

This paper aims to suggest policy alternatives for higher qualification of APEC-wide ECOTECH activities. The alternatives are two: proposing the establishment of a new fund, APEC New Growth Engine Fund (ANGEF); suggesting an amendment of the Quality Assessment Framework to be applied to future ANGEF projects at designing, monitoring, and assessing levels of ECOTECH activities. The designing level emphasizes systemic linkage between Leaders’ Meetings’ directives and each economy’s specificity-based follow-up. Monitoring stresses both the principle of fine-tuning mechanisms to respond to changing needs and partnership among the public, private, and international organizations. Assessment accentuates the principle of effectiveness rather than that of efficiency. In proceeding with discussions to come up with ways to establish a new fund, an overview and evaluation was undertaken. The overview deals with direction- and follow up-based connections among APEC, ECOTECH, and Working Groups as well as a review of the role played by ECOTECH. The evaluation deals with eleven working groups’ activities in terms of whether or to what extent progress in achieving the Ecotech goals has been made. The resulting conclusion, and the thesis of this paper, is that the effective linkage between ECOTECH priorities and ANGEF projects is causally linked with the task of the successful establishment of ANGEF which will help substantiate fusion effects among strategy-implementation, inter-fora collaborative efforts, and input from share holders among APEC economies.