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.
Green growth was a key theme of 2012's Rio+20 conference. There is, however, confusion about what should be sustained: Is it all encompassing development? Is it economic growth, greened or otherwise? Or is it human well-being? This commentary compares these concepts within a framework of sustainability categories. The reality test of measurability points to green growth rather than all-inclusive wealth, welfare or holistic development.
This paper uses a Directional Distance Function (DDF) and the Malmquist–Luenberger Productivity Index to estimate the changing patterns of ‘green’ total factor productivity (GTFP) growth of 38 Chinese industrial sectors during the period 1980–2010. Unlike the measures of traditional total factor productivity (TFP) growth, the DDF incorporates carbon dioxide emissions as an undesirable output directly into the production technology, which credit sectors for simultaneously reducing their emissions and increasing their output. Our estimates of aggregate and sector-level GTFP growth reveal that Chinese industry is not yet on the path towards sustainable, low-carbon growth. A dynamic panel data analysis of the determinants of GTFP across sectors is used to identify factors that might rectify this situation, including state owned enterprise (SOE) reform, the growth of small private enterprises, continued openness to foreign investment and higher spending on R&D, particularly in emission-intensive sectors.
This analysis of the emergence since 2008 of the green economy agenda and the related idea of ‘green growth’ focusses upon the articulation of these discourses within key international economic and environmental institutions and evaluates whether this implies the beginning of an institutional transformation towards an ecologically sustainable world economy. The green economy may have the capacity to help animate a transition away from current socially and ecologically unsustainable patterns of economic growth only if notions of green growth can be discursively separated from green economy, strong articulations of green economy become dominant, and alternative measures of progress to gross domestic product are widely adopted. The concept of ‘rearticulation’, found in post-structural discourse theory, is proposed to guide this transition. This offers a framework to reconstruct notions of prosperity, progress, and security whilst avoiding direct and disempowering discursive conflict with currently hegemonic pro-growth discourses.
Hopes for a grand deal were mercilessly shattered at Copenhagen in December 2009 and in other recent UNFCCC meetings, with the result that “green growth” is promoted as an alternative path. Indeed, green growth is clearly the goal, but it is no magic bullet. The world economy will require clear and rather tough policy instruments for growth to be green—and it is naïve to think otherwise. Growth, green or not, will boost demand for energy and coal is normally the cheapest source. The magnitude of the challenge is greater if we also consider the problems related to nuclear (fission) energy and, in some instances, to bioenergy (such as its competition for land that may be essential for the poor). This paper discusses some necessary ingredients for a long-term global climate strategy. As we wait for the final (and maybe elusive) worldwide treaty, we must find a policy that makes sense and is not only compatible with, but facilitates the development of such a treaty.