The concept of the green economy presented in three reports from leading global organizations is examined in this paper. These include the United Nations Environment Programme's Towards a Green Economy, the World Bank's Inclusive Green Growth and the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development's Towards Green Growth. The main critiques of the concept of the green economy are also considered. Contrary to views that the green economy merely represents ‘green-washing’ and tweaking of the current economic system, this paper concludes that the green economy has the potential to effect substantive and transformative change towards the goal of sustainable development.
This paper argues that there are significant opportunities and challenges for promoting inclusive green growth in Africa without costly policy reversal. The paper demonstrates that inclusive green growth entails supporting growth that enhances human wellbeing, social equity and shared economic opportunities while reducing environmental risks and ecological scarcities, minimizing inefficient use of natural resources and maintaining biodiversity among others. Strategy for inclusive green growth should integrate environmental, social and economic issues into development plans and policies and take a long-term view of these issues as interdependent issues rather than mutually exclusive ones.
The paper studies two empirical correlations: one between economic growth and environmental impacts, and the other between the lack of economic growth and unemployment. It is demonstrated that, at a global level, economic growth is strongly correlated with environmental impacts, and barriers to fast decoupling are large and numerous. On the other hand, low or negative growth is highly correlated with increasing unemployment in most market economies, and strategies to change this lead to difficult questions and tradeoffs. The coexistence of these two correlations – which have rarely been studied together in the literature on “green growth”, “degrowth” and “a-growth” – justifies ambivalence about growth. To make key environmental goals compatible with full employment, the decoupling of environmental impacts from economic output has to be accompanied by a reduction of dependence on growth. In particular, strategies to tackle unemployment without the need for growth, several of which are studied in this article, need much more attention in research and policy.
Green growth cannot succeed without significant changes in the education system and the closely related social division of labor. This paper combines historical evidence and a game-theoretic analysis to study the relation between vocational education and green growth. It is found that a low-vocation and a high-vocation equilibrium can be distinguished in the interplay between education and labor markets, and that a high-vocation equilibrium is better suited for green growth. At the present stage of development, there are tendencies in both directions in China. Therefore, China has the possibility to successfully implement a green growth strategy by developing a strong vocational education with Chinese characteristics.
The paper appears in the Special Issue: Climate Change and Green Growth: New Thinking.