Brendon Tankwa

Biography

Brendon Tankwa is an Associate Fellow at INET Oxford and a Consultant at Boston Consulting Group. His work sits at the intersection of technological change, the energy transition, and economic development.

He studies how technologies spread across countries, what drives cost declines in clean energy, and what enables faster adoption and scale-up. Drawing on complexity economics, data science, and large-scale historical datasets, he examines the drivers of technology diffusion and green industrial change. His research focuses in particular on the pace, pattern, and uneven character of technological progress across countries and sectors, including how leadership shifts over time and why the benefits of progress are not always broadly shared. During his DPhil at INET Oxford, he examined long-run patterns of national technology diffusion and the role of policy in shaping renewable energy deployment.

Before Oxford, Brendon co-founded a clean-tech startup focused on battery storage and demand-side management, and has worked on projects spanning energy, finance, and strategy. He holds a DPhil and an MSc in Environmental Change and Management from the University of Oxford, and a BASc in Engineering Physics from the University of British Columbia. He was supported by the Rhodes Trust and the Bezos Earth Fund, and is a former Mastercard Foundation Scholar.