The Foreign Service Journal, July-August 2017

THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL | JULY-AUGUST 2017 33 India strategic dialogue—and marked the formal policy adoption of PACE. As many previous contributors to this magazine have pointed out, official visits represent a fruitful mechanism through which to bring policy ideas over the finish line. This is most clearly visi- ble at the head-of-state level, but the same benefits can flow from trips by Cabinet officials and high-ranking civil servants. During President Barack Obama’s first months in office, senior officials from the Department of Energy, National Security Council, Overseas Private Investment Corporation, Export-Import Bank and the Trade Development Agency all traveled to New Delhi to probe the potential for bilateral clean energy collaboration. Some senior Indian officials reciprocated those visits, of course. That outreach paved the way for the November 2009 trip to Washington by Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh—the first state visit of the Obama administration—and Pres. Obama’s first visit to India a year later. Embassy New Delhi, Washington interagency stakeholders and our Indian counterparts used these visits as action-forcing events to deepen the high-level commitment on both sides to make the Partnership to Advance Clean Energy a reality. A Big Enough Sandbox for Everyone From the outset, the NSC played a pivotal role, endorsing the PACE concept and using its convening power to bring together all U.S. government stakeholders. In relatively short order, a dozen U.S. agencies and departments joined the initiative. Through this process, we learned to frame our objectives broadly enough to allow many different organizations to help realize a deliberately ambitious agenda. It was critical for diverse partici- pants each to be able to add unique value, be mutually support- ive and avoid wasting time with turf battles. Over countless conference calls between Washington and New Delhi, we became one U.S. team working to shape PACE and a coherent strategy for its implementation. Through iterative conversations, we identified the resources and expertise that each stakeholder organization could bring to the table. We used the time in between calls to socialize prospective commitments within our respective organizations and with our Indian counter- parts, reality-checking our aspirations and inevitably recalibrat- ing as we went. Converting the political will behind PACE into meaningful, wide-scale dissemination of clean energy technology also meant creating an enabling environment for clean energy markets to develop. That, in turn, required extensive technical training and capacity building, regulatory policy development, collabora- tive research and financial investments both small and large. In short, the vision and the brand of PACE needed to be many things to many different players, since the figurative, as well as literal, buy-in required myriad champions. While government agencies were the primary drivers of the initiative, the Indian-American diaspora—tech-savvy and well represented in science and engineering-intensive businesses and academic organizations—helped mobilize additional Indian support. Setting the PACE As we implemented PACE, we identified three distinct lines of effort within the broader initiative: research and development, deployment and financing. The organization with the strongest core competency and track record of work in each focus area naturally took the lead in that line of effort and brought along partner organizations. The Department of Energy led the clean energy research and development effort, which we nicknamed PACE-R. The U.S. Agency for International Development and Embassy New Delhi led efforts to supply the policy and technical assistance neces- sary to create an enabling environment for rapid and widespread clean energy deployment: PACE-D. In addition, OPIC, ExIm Bank and TDA collaborated to set up a Clean Energy Finance Center focused on the specific challenges associated with clean energy finance. All the while, each of these subgroups remained open to including new partners, and leveraged their pooled resources to bring others together in turn. The example of PACE-R is illustrative. Led by the Department of Energy, which oversees the tremendous expertise resident in multiple national energy laboratories, the PACE-R team came A solar-powered street light in a village in India. WIKIMEDIACOMMONS/IRRAD