Question

Why green growth is particularly important from an International Political Economy perspective? (Relationship between green growth and IPE)

Answer 1

The global recession has brought new attention to chronic structural flaws in current economic models and assumptions. As economies struggle to recover, many are taking a closer look at the broad concept of a "Green Economy," one that simultaneously promotes sustainability and economic growth

A Green Economy can be thought of as an alternative vision for growth and development; one that can generate growth and improvements in people’s lives in ways consistent with sustainable development. A Green Economy promotes a triple bottom line: sustaining and advancing economic, environmental and social well-being.

The prevailing economic growth model is focused on increasing GDP above all other goals. While this system has improved incomes and reduced poverty for hundreds of millions, it comes with significant and potentially irreversible social, environmental and economic costs. Poverty persists for as many as two and a half billion people, and the natural wealth of the planet is rapidly being drawn down. In a recent global assessment, approximately 60 percent of the world’s ecosystem services were found to be degraded or used unsustainably. The gap between the rich and poor is also increasing – between 1990 and 2005, income inequality(measured by the gap between the highest and lowest income earners) rose in more than two thirds of countries.

The persistence of poverty and degradation of the environment can be traced to a series of market and institutional failures that make the prevailing economic model far less effective than it otherwise would be in advancing sustainable development goals. These market and institutional failures are well known to economists, but little progress has been made to address them. For example, there are not sufficient mechanisms to ensure that polluters pay the full cost of their pollution. There are “missing markets” – meaning that markets do not systematically account for the inherent value of services provided by nature, like water filtration or coastal protection. A “market economy” alone cannot provide public goods, like efficient electricity grids, sanitation or public transportation. And economic policy is often shaped by those who wield power, with strong vested interests, and rarely captures the voice and perspectives of those most at risk.

A Green Economy attempts to remedy these problems through a variety of institutional reforms and regulatory, tax, and expenditure-based economic policies and tools.

From the late 1980s onwards and with the end of the Cold War, the growing focus on international governance and the rising influence of environmentalism resulted in the incorporation of the environment into the discipline as a merely peripheral concern. It was another in a parade of ‘issue areas’ unproblematically analysed under the ambit of the discipline’s predominant frameworks, which were inherited from IPE’s parent discipline of International Relations (IR). In this way the environment was not thought to require a fundamental re-theorisation of either the discipline or understandings of the International Political Economy, as was neatly captured in Steve Smith’s explanation of the environment’s status on the periphery of IR

Echoing the calls of others ), this reiterates the necessity of incorporating the insights of ecology within IPE/IR disciplines as part of a green IPE In part this is about taking seriously the inseparability of the environment and economy, and is where ecological economics or green economics might be well placed to make a contribution . Ecological economics departs from the neoclassically informed discipline of environmental economics by critiquing its lack of attention to limits to growth, the modes of valuation (of costs and benefits) and discounting employed and the values and interests that are downplayed by framing environmental problems in those terms Here the assumption is that the environment and the economy are inseparable and that the environment provides key functions for economic systems (resources, sinks, amenities and life-support mechanisms for consumption) reflected in concerns with ‘ecological debt and ‘ecological footprints and the abuse and exploitation of ‘free resources by capitalist investors Attempts to map ecological flows have immense value in highlighting issues of ecological debt, uneven development and responsibility and the long ‘shadows cast by global patterns of consumption