This paper analyses the performance of the Dutch “Green Funds Scheme”. This scheme is a policy instrument to advance green projects. The scheme relies on tax compensation for private investors who save or invest in green institutions below market returns. The green institutions select and monitor certified green projects and pass through part of the lower funding costs to investors. Certification of the green projects is based on environmental value-added and innovation. The authors provide a description of the characteristics of this incentive scheme and investigate the scheme's performance.
This article appears in the Special Issue: Green Economy and Sustainable Development.
This article examines the potential contribution of household scale off-grid renewable energy generation to the post-carbon economy. The large-scale focus of the green jobs agenda in high-income countries obscures how small-scale technologies can be a transformative source of employment in developing economies. Debates about what constitutes a green job and their value leaves out the everyday practice of green livelihoods carried out by the urban poor across the African continent in unfavourable institutional contexts where nonrenewable fuel is subsidised and renewable energy inputs are heavily taxed. The article presents experiences from field work in several countries, including Egypt, Nigeria and Kenya to provide practical examples of communities pursuing strategies of income generation, community empowerment and environmental preservation. It argues that scholars and practitioners concerned with both social justice and environmental preservation should embrace a definition of green jobs that is bottom-up or people-centred.
A green economy that incorporates a vision of environmental sustainability and equitable social development requires a fundamental rethinking of the existing economic models which centre on growth. In theory, this rethinking leans towards political ecology, which explores the State's relationship with market and civil society. In practice, more dynamic and inclusive public-private partnerships are being sought after in various domains of sustainable development. However, very little has been clarified with regard to the basic conditions that make dynamic partnerships both sustainable and equitable. This paper proposes to explore potential conditions by drawing on the public procurement of local food for school meals. The so-called home-grown school feeding initiative is a pertinent example because it focuses on the qualities of public services that do not fully follow the conventional free market principle, but instead promote the deliberative engagement of various actors.
Green growth, the promotion of energy efficiency and clean energy technologies and sustainable development are frequently viewed as complementary goals by international policymakers. This paper argues that green growth will not ensure sustainable economic development as long as global ecosystem degradation and loss means that the world continues to face worsening problems of ecological scarcity — the loss of myriad benefits, or “services”, as these systems are exploited for human use and activity. Overcoming this problem requires addressing further sustainability and funding challenges. The sustainability challenge is to overcome a vast array of market, policy and institutional failures that prevents recognition of the economic significance of this scarcity. The funding challenge is to bridge the shortfall between the global benefits that humankind receives from ecosystems and what we are willing to pay to maintain and conserve them. Improving economic and scientific analysis of ecological scarcity, valuing the loss in benefits, and translating the implications into policy are the key steps for addressing the sustainability challenge.
Global interest in the ‘green economy’ has heightened since 2008, and this article contributes to these discussions by elaborating on (a) four alternative, and sometimes competing, discourses of the green economy, and (b) the particular politics of the green economy in South Africa. Most research on the green economy tends to focus on European and North American countries, however in the context of a changing global economy and the ‘rise of the South’ the politics of the green economy in countries like South Africa is of increasing importance. South Africa faces many challenges in pursuing a transition to a more sustainable development path, yet has been cited as a global green economy leader. This article argues that this is related to the particular discourse of ‘green growth’ which is dominant in South Africa, and proposes two significant lines of critique of this discourse. The first cautions that commitment to the green economy may not be particularly deep-rooted, sustained or coherent; and the second highlights some of the more troubling political implications of the type of green growth advocated, even if it were to be pursued with more determination.
Readiness is a concept interchanged with preparedness and, many assume, adequate knowledge. Simple as it may be, readiness denotes a complex interaction of parameters and conditionalities required for an uptake of a phenomenon – in the context of this article, green economy transition. Following deliberations to and from Rio + 20, there is no doubt the world is set to undertake green economy as a means to attaining sustainable development, poverty eradication, job creation and equity evermore. At the heart of the green economy is the need to address negative impacts associated with one of the key global challenges of our epoch, climate change. The question this article seeks to address is: To what extent is South Africa green economy ready? Focusing on the national sphere of government, the article concludes that this country has moved swiftly in addressing key readiness parameters, including high-level commitment and stakeholder buy-in, enhancing institutional set-up, developing the necessary legislation, establishing funding mechanisms and having programmes running on the ground.
In the wake of the global financial crisis, interest in the relationship between the economy and the environment substantially increased. Several proposals emerged between 2008 and 2012 for the creation of a ‘Green New Deal’, ‘Green Stimulus’, and a ‘Green Economy’. These proposals are often conflated with one another under the rubric of ‘green capitalism’, but there are important distinctions to be made between them. Each suggests a different role for the state in regulating the market and the financial sector (i.e. they suggest different models of capitalism). The proposals can also be distinguished by the positions taken on ecological modernisation (i.e. they put forward different models of ‘greenness’). Recognition that there are varieties of green capitalism being mooted increases the opportunities for more targeted critiques of each model and enables a more constructive debate about the options for creating sustainable economies in the developed world.
The social goals of reducing unemployment and enabling ecologically sustainable development are more likely to be achieved if the spatial dimensions of economic policy are made explicit. Looking from this perspective, this article considers recent policy initiatives undertaken by the federal Labor government in response to the global financial crisis. Investment in infrastructure is assessed by comparing where government expenditure is being targeted with the regional distribution of unemployment. The expansion of ‘green’ jobs is considered in relation to the prospects of marrying concerns of growth, equity and sustainability with proactive urban and regional policies.
This article describes a multidisciplinary study of market-based policies for controlling air pollution in China. While previous studies have examined the costs and benefits of pollution control separately, this approach determines them together using an economy–environment model for China. We employ air dispersion simulations and population maps to calculate health damages due to air pollution. This provides estimates of incremental damages for industry output and fuel use. Based on these marginal damages, we simulate the effect of “green taxes” on the economy and show that the environmental benefits exceed the aggregate costs, ignoring adjustment costs for individual sectors.