IISD and the Partnership for Procurement and Green Growth conducted an investigation to explore the correlation between public procurement and the tipping point at which it serves as a trigger for green industrial innovation, expansion and growth. Building on the existing body of work that supports the case for green public procurement, the report demonstrates that procurement is becoming more than just a purchasing tool, but is increasingly positioned as an economic driver, an incentive for green innovation and green industrialisation, a support for small and medium enterprise (SME) competitiveness and much more.
Environmental information transparency performs social and learning functions indispensable for green growth. Still facing the challenges of a lack of local commitment and less than optimal institutional capacity, China has made substantial progress on granting and enforcing the public right to environmental information. This will help build the social infrastructure necessary for green growth — the rule of law, trust, social organizing, consensus building, social learning, and collective action. A focused approach is desirable because resources and capacity are limited in China — targeting pollutants and sectors that exert the most environmental and health risks as well as those that need technological upgrade most urgently. Then, in the long run, environmental information transparency serves the fundamental goals of ‘good public policy and legitimate governmental decision-making’ on environment-related issues in China, in line with both the green growth framework and the long-term development goal of constructing a harmonious society in China.
The developing world is experiencing substantial environmental change, and climate change is likely to accelerate these processes in the coming decades. Due to their relatively high dependence on environmental capital for their livelihoods, and to their limited resources for mitigation and investment in adaptation, the poor are likely to suffer most. Economic growth is essential for any large-scale poverty reduction.
Much of the rural poor -- who are growing in number -- are concentrated in ecologically fragile and remote areas. The key ecological scarcity problem facing such poor households is a vicious cycle of declining livelihoods, increased ecological degradation and loss of resource commons, and declining ecosystem services on which the poor depend. In addition, developing economies with high concentrations of their populations on fragile lands and in remote areas not only display high rates of rural poverty, but also are some of the poorest countries in the world today. Policies to eradicate poverty therefore need to be targeted at the poor where they live, especially the rural poor clustered in fragile environments and remote areas.
A green growth agenda requires policy makers, from local to supranational levels, to examine and influence behavior that impacts economic, social, and environmental outcomes on multiple scales. Behavioral and social change, in addition or conjunction with technological change, is thus a crucial component of any green growth strategy. A better understanding of how and why people consume, preserve, or exploit resources or otherwise make choices that collectively impact the environment has important and far-reaching consequences for the predictive accuracy of more sophisticated models, both of future states of the world and of the likely impact of different growth strategies and potential risk management strategies. The prevailing characterization of human decision making in policy circles is a rational economic one. Reliance on the assumptions of rational choice excludes from consideration a wide range of factors that affect how people make decisions and therefore need to be considered in predictions of human reactions to environmental conditions or proposed policy initiatives.