The green growth narrative: Paradigm shift or just spin?
Alex Bowen2011, Global Environmental Change
Sign up for access to the world's latest research
Abstract
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
