Abstract
This chapter argues that game-changing green-growth must be rooted on economic approaches allowing for the inherent complexity of human-environment relationships, implemented through multi-stakeholders and multi-scale governance arrangements and fuelled by policies and managerial techniques promoting synergies – rather than just decoupling – between environment and growth. The evolution of conceptualizations between growth and environment is first discussed in this chapter. The debate evolves from zero-growth versus uncontrolled growth, to sustainability and parallel discourses emphasizing such principles as ecological modernization and the win-win paradigm. The chapter then describes the emerging discourse of Green Growth and positions this discourse in the context of its predecessors. Transition challenges (e.g. how can we define and measure green growth) and an overview of diverse methods to meet environmental challenges, such as cradle-to-cradle will also be summarized. A framework conceptualizing the main dimensions of Green Growth and mapping the chapters to this framework is then introduced.
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Notes
- 1.
The Limits to Growth was the subject of heated debates. Its detractors argued that computed models were manipulated selecting the least favourable set of assumptions about economic ‘feedback mechanisms’ by which increases in price will always result in a decrease in consumption, more efficient technologies and more efficient use of stocks.
- 2.
Ecological Modernization comes from social scientist Joseph Huber’s (1982) ideas, which see environmental degradation as a structural problem that does not require a radical change in the political-economic system, but a gradual reorganization of the capitalist economic structure to include environmental criteria.
- 3.
For instance ‘weak sustainability” sees the inefficient use of resources as the crucial problem, thus focusing on the use of innovative technologies to improve resource supply and reduce waste (techno-fix). Strong sustainability sees bloated consumption patterns that go beyond earth’s carrying capacity as the crucial problem, thus emphazising behaviour change and decrease of human demand (Williams and Millington 2004).
- 4.
For instance, the End-of-Life Vehicle and Waste Electrical and Electronic Equipment (WEEE) Directives, enacted by the European Union that makes manufacturers responsible for automotive and electronics materials disposal. Another case in point is the Registration, Evaluation and Authorisation of Chemicals (REACH) normative. REACH extends producers’ responsibility downstream the supply chain and makes manufacturers and importers of chemicals responsible for providing information and implementing risk management measures.
- 5.
Similarly, The United Nations Commission on the Private Sector and Development (UNCPSD) thinks that promoting entrepreneurship can be a more effective solution for global poverty than economic humanitarian aid. The commission reckons that the existence of entrepreneurs, adequately sponsored by a solid institutional framework, fortifies all dimensions of adaptive capacity, creates opportunities for saving, employment and innovation, taking into account local conditions, and integrates marginal groups although it can potentially reduce the natural capital (UNCPSD 2004).
- 6.
Each wave has a particular geography and follows four distinctive phases: prosperity, recession, depression and recovery. Industrial society has passed through five waves so far. The last two k-waves were 40–80s era of Fordist mass production (in the USA, Germany, Japan, Switzerland, Australia) and the Information and Communication K-wave that started in the 1980s and is now entering its fourth decade (in Japan, USA, Germany, Sweden, Korea, Taiwan, Canada) (Dicken 2007).
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Vazquez-Brust, D.A., Sarkis, J. (2012). Green Growth: Managing the Transition to Sustainable Economies. In: Vazquez-Brust, D., Sarkis, J. (eds) Green Growth: Managing the Transition to a Sustainable Economy. Greening of Industry Networks Studies, vol 1. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-4417-2_1
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