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Environmental justice and conceptions of the green economy

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Abstract

Green economy has become one of the most fashionable terms in global environmental public policy discussions and forums. Despite this popularity, and its being selected as one of the organizing themes of the United Nations Rio+20 Conference in Brazil, June 2012, its prospects as an effective mobilization tool for global environmental sustainability scholarship and practice remain unclear. A major reason for this is that much like its precursor concepts such as environmental sustainability and sustainable development, green economy is a woolly concept, which lends itself to many interpretations. Hence, rather than resolve long-standing controversies, green economy merely reinvigorates existing debates over the visions, actors and policies best suited to secure a more sustainable future for all. In this review article, we aim to fill an important gap in scholarship by suggesting various ways in which green economy may be organized and synthesized as a concept, and especially in terms of its relationship with the idea of social and environmental justice. Accordingly, we offer a systemization of possible interpretations of green economy mapped onto a synthesis of existing typologies of environmental justice. This classification provides the context for future analysis of which, and how, various notions of green economy link with various conceptions of justice.

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Notes

  1. Green economy has recently and usefully been differentiated from concepts such as ‘Green New Deal’ and ‘Green Stimulus’ (Tienhaara 2013). However, we do not take up these distinctions here because we believe the ramifications of each concept for justice are largely interchangeable.

Abbreviations

EKC:

Environmental Kuznets curve

GDP:

Gross domestic product

GE:

Green economy

OECD:

Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development

UNEP:

United Nations Environment Programme

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Acknowledgments

The authors wish to thank Dimitris Stevis and Dale Jamieson, as well as the editorial board of this Journal, for their helpful and insightful comments on an earlier draft of this article. Any errors or omissions remain the sole responsibility of the authors.

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  1. Department of Politics, University of the South--Sewanee, Sewanee, TN, 37383, USA

    Timothy G. Ehresman

  2. Department of Geography and Environmental Science, University of Reading, Whiteknights Campus, P.O. Box 433, Reading, RG6 6AB, UK

    Chukwumerije Okereke

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Ehresman, T.G., Okereke, C. Environmental justice and conceptions of the green economy. Int Environ Agreements 15, 13–27 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10784-014-9265-2

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