Green growth is an impossible lie

In 1987, the UN World Commission on Development and the Environment presented the report Our Common Future, better known as the Brundtland report, coining the concept of ‘sustainable development‘, then launching it at the Rio Summit on Environment and Development in 1992 – Principle 12 of the Declaration. Within such a framing, the push towards growth and economic liberalization was taken further at subsequent global events relating to sustainable development, though partially concealed behind the rhetoric of environmental sustainability. Compared to the United Nations Conference on Environment and Development in Stockholm 1972, the later conferences involved reframing both the diagnosis and prognosis in relation to the ecological crisis. The focus supposedly became poverty in developing countries, instead of affuence in developed countries, along the lines of the post-materialist thesis of Inglehart. This idea that ‘you frst need to be rich, in order to be an environmentalist’ has been critiqued by Martinez-Alier with his famous concept of environmentalism of the poor (Inglehart, 1990). Economic growth was freed of stigma and redefned as a necessary step towards the solution of environmental problems. (Gómez-Baggethun & Naredo, 2015) This watering down of the initial debates of the 1970s infuenced by the Limits to Growth report (Meadows et al., 1972) constitutes the core of the ‘green economy’, a kind of Green Keynesianism with reformist new millennium proposals, such as a Green New Deal, and the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development. At the UN Conference for Sustainable Development in 2012, the so-called Rio + 20 Summit, the ‘green economy’ concept played a key role as the guiding framework of the multilateral discussions, although resistance from many southern nations meant it was not as central as its proponents may have wished. In preparation for the summit, The United Nations Environmental Programme (UNEP) published a report on ‘green economy’, defning it ‘as one that results in improved human well-being and social equity, while signifcantly reducing environmental risks and ecological scarcities’ (UNEP, 2011). In consonance with the pro-growth approach of sustainable development, the report bypassed any trade-off between economic growth and environmental conservation and conceptualized ‘nature‘as natural capital, a ‘critical economic asset’ opening the doors for commodifcation. In fact, it clearly stated that ‘the key aim for a transition to a green economy is to enable economic growth and investment while increasing environmental quality and social inclusiveness (UNEP, 2011).’ 6 Post-development: From the Critique of Development to a Pluriverse of Alternatives 64 This environmental economics approach is based on neoclassical economic theory and a belief that economic growth will de-link or decouple itself from its environmental base through dematerialization and de-pollution because of the improvement in eco-effciency, viz. increased resource productivity and decreased pollution. In this conceptual framework, market prices are considered the appropriate means for solving environmental issues and exogenous rates of technological progress are expected to counterbalance the effects of resource exhaustion. However, the confict between a growth-dominated economy and environmental protection cannot be solved with appeals to ‘sustainable development‘, ‘eco-effciency’, ‘ecological modernisation’, ‘geo-engineering’, ‘smart agricultures’ or ‘cities’, ‘circular’ or ‘green economy’. These are false solutions. The sustainable development approach remains fundamentally fawed on a number of counts. For instance, the fnal objective for a New Green Deal is the creation of ‘resilient low carbon economies, rich in jobs and based on independent sources of energy supply’ (UNEP, 2011; NEF, 2008). While on this end there might general agreement, the controversy remains on the means. Among the faws or weaknesses of the sustainable development approach as articulated thus far in various UN-sponsored documents, including the declaration Transforming our world: The 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, (UNEP, 2011; United Nations, 2013; SDSN, 2013; United Nations, 2015; United Nations Secretary-General’s High-level Panel on Global Sustainability, 2012) are the following (Kothari, 2013): 1. ‘Absence of an analysis of the historical and structural roots of poverty, hunger, unsustainability and inequities, which include centralization of state power and capitalist monopolies; 2. Inadequate focus on direct democratic governance (decision-making by citizens and communities in face-to-face settings), beyond the stress on accountability and transparency; 3. Inability to recognize the biophysical limits to economic growth; 4. Continued subservience to private capital, and inability or unwillingness to democratise the economy; 5. Modern science and technology held up as panacea, ignoring their limits and marginalising other forms of knowledge; 6. Culture, ethics and spirituality side-lined; 7. Unbridled consumerism not tackled head-on; 8. Global relations built on localization and self-reliance missing; and, 9. No new architecture of global governance, with a continued reliance on the centrality of nation-states, denying true democratisation’.