Green growth's false premises and alternative policy proposals

Science

Global Environmental Change, 2011

Green growth has become a buzz word in both policy and academic circles. A clear definition is still lacking, but most analysts would associate the term with environmentally sustainable, biodiverse, low-carbon and climate-resilient growth in human prosperity. That is, green growth is much more than just low-carbon growth of conventional GDP, although the focus often is on climate change mitigation and GDP-based measures of costs and benefits. The attraction of the green growth narrative is both strategic and analytical. From a strategic point of view, green growth allows environmental protection to be cast as a question of opportunity and reward, rather than costly restraint. Authors such as Barrett (2003, 2007) have long argued that a key barrier to reaching an international agreement on climate change is the burden-sharing focus of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change. The UNFCCC and the Kyoto Protocol are structured around obligations, targets, penalties and costs. As such, they are not very attractive agreements to join or to defend in addressing electorates. A structure that rewards environmental behaviour, for example, by offering market opportunities for clean energy, would be much easier to agree. The green growth narrative responds to this observation and aims to reposition both the international and national debates on climate change and the environment. The analytical argument is perhaps more fundamental, and mostly relates to the economics of climate change. For years the economic debate on greenhouse gas mitigation has been about marginal abatement costs. Economists and engineers have argued at length about the merits of various cost estimates, the difference between top-down and bottom-up modelling, the existence of an energy efficiency gap and much else (see, for example, Kuik et al., 2009; Edenhofer et al., 2010, for recent discussions). But their analysis is usually divorced from broader economic and environmental concerns, such as the co-benefits of mitigation. The 'green growth' agenda abandons this narrow focus, throwing the debate wide open and bringing broader, more nuanced and richer strands of economics to bear. In doing so the emerging green growth literature can draw on many long traditions of economic thinking that encompass the work of, among others, John Maynard Keynes, Arthur Cecil Pigou, Joseph Schumpeter, and Henry George. The agenda also opens up important new research questions which policy-makers will need answered. 2. The Keynesian perspective Considering first short-term horizons-which seem to be of most importance in politics-the 'green growth' agenda reconnects

Policy Research Working Papers, 2012

Oxford Review of Economic Policy, 2014

The relatively new and still amorphous concept of 'green growth' can be understood as a call for balancing longer-term investments in sustaining environmental wealth with nearer-term income growth to reduce poverty. We draw on a large body of economic theory available for providing insights on such balancing of income growth and environmental sustainability. We show that there is no a priori assurance of substantial positive spillovers from environmental policies to income growth, or for a monotonic transition to a 'green steady state' along an optimal path. The greenness of an optimal growth path can depend heavily on initial conditions, with a variety of different adjustments occurring concurrently along an optimal path. Factor-augmenting technical-change targeting at offsetting resource depletion is critical to sustaining long-term growth within natural limits on the availability of natural resources and environmental services.

2016

The discourse of “green growth” has recently gained ground in environmental governance deliberations and policy proposals. It is presented as a fresh and innovative agenda centered on the deployment of engineering sophistication, managerial acumen, and market mechanisms to redress the environmental and social derelictions of the existing development model. But the green growth project is deeply inadequate, whether assessed against criteria of social justice or the achievement of sustainable economic life upon a materially finite planet. This volume outlines three main lines of critique. First, it traces the development of the green growth discourse qua ideology. It asks: what explains modern society’s investment in it, why has it emerged as a master concept in the contemporary conjuncture, and what social forces does it serve? Second, it unpicks and explains the contradictions within a series of prominent green growth projects. Finally, it weighs up the merits and demerits of alternative strategies and policies, asking the vital question: “If not green growth, then what?”

Ecological Economics, 1995

The feasibility of green growth is studied in the context of climate change. As carbon emissions are easier to quantify than many other types of environmental pressure, it will be possible to reach a more definite conclusion about the likelihood of green growth than has been possible in the long-standing historical debate on growth versus the environment. We calculate the rate of decoupling between GDP and greenhouse gas emissions needed to achieve internationally agreed climate targets. Next, eight arguments are considered that together suggest that fast decoupling will be very difficult. Subsequently, we examine the main lines of research used by proponents of green growth to support their viewpoint, including theoretical arguments, exercises with integrated assessment models and studies of the environmental Kuznets curve hypothesis. It will be concluded that decoupling as a main or single strategy to combine economic and environmental aims should be judged as taking a very large risk with our common future. To minimize this risk we need to seriously consider reducing our dependence on growth. This requires a fundamental change of focus in both economic research and policy.

Green Growth, 2016

The term "green growth', like the phrase 'sustainable development', always sounds a bit defensive. It's as if its users were saying, 'Sure, most people expect growth not to be green -but in fact it can be!' Yet mingled with that defensiveness is grandiosity: 'We now have the power to break altogether the links between capital accumulation and degradation of the conditions of human existence that have marked the last half millennium.' Proposals for green growth ambitiously seek to engage at least three crises at once. First, they promise to respond to economic crisis by developing new environmental assets, rentable properties and repair projects that, it is asserted, will someday be objects for profitable investment. This investment, it is suggested, will address ecological crises ranging from climate change and water shortages to biodiversity depletion and deforestation in depoliticized ways that help free business from constraints that would otherwise be imposed on it by environmental movements, planners or state regulators. Finally, green growth proposals claim to be able to relieve the state of much of the increasing expense of environmental protection. Can this pompous, implausible triple promise be fulfilled? There are reasons for skepticism on all three fronts, but this chapter will focus largely on the claim that green growth can address ecological crises. It will argue that in practice, green growth is not about solving ecological crises but rather reinterpreting them, creating new opportunities to take business advantage of them, and diffusing responsibility for them. It is not about forging a benign kind of growth, but about creating a new type of 'green' -new types of 'nature'. These new natures, while distinctive, turn out to feature much the same sort of contradictions and unsustainabilities as do older natures that have historically grown up with and helped to constitute capital. Various aspects of their construction are being and will continue to be resisted by those whose lives and livelihoods involve defending commons.

This article aims to identify the current discussion on green growth, and focuses on the role of public finance in promoting a transition towards green growth. Terms such as "green economy" and "green growth" have become popular in international policy discourse as ways of describing recent efforts to improve the environmental performance of the economy. In this article, the definitions offered by several international institutions are compared and some commonalities are identified. The rationale behind green growth can be explained within the framework of the growth theory. Investment is indispensable to the practical promotion of green growth activities. Using Vietnam as a case study, we identify the critical factors for encouraging and enabling green investment. However, further theoretical background should be developed. In particular, pricing on environmental goods and services is a critical challenge for both the theoretical and the practical development of green growth. Further theoretical and practical study on green growth may improve the discussion on the growth theory as well as the development of policies that promote investment in green growth. To deepen the discussion, further case studies need to be collected and analyzed.

Futures, 2014