Can a Green Economy Provide

Foundations for Equity and

Sustainability on Earth?
By Uchita de Zoysa
Future makes little meaning when the mind of greed is determined to prevail. Some old brown
approaches to frame a green economy raises concerns whether the same actors of the prevailing global
system of inequity are planning to green the greed. This feeling makes us worry that the system actors
are trying out the next best strategy to continue with the exploitation of resources and poor.

The United Nations Organization through the Rio 2012 Summit is providing the best venue for to further
stretch the time of the prevailing global socio-economic system on earth; a system that keeps half of the
population in poverty and increases vulnerability of the rest through climate change. More desperation
would provide greater markets for those who live in profit temples of greed. Now that the faith on the
capital growth economic system has crumbled, a new short term remedy is needed. Old games and new
tricks are at work. It is called the ‘Green Economy’ and promises the fallen economy a new hope to
grow; grow differently but surely as in ‘Green Growth’.

Not just business, and not just governments, but even civil society and the commonest person on the
street wants to know what a new green economy is. Business would like to simplify the entire meaning
and call it the opportunities for employees to find work in places that produces goods and services that
are green and clean. They would like to imply that consumers would be benefited by a cleaner planet
and a healthier life. That’s what they mean when they say green jobs, green technology, green
production or green consumption. But at the end, they do not wish for levels of consumerism to be
lowered but only made efficient and greener; a transition strategy to keep the planet in balance with the
profit not eroding.

When governments talk about green growth, they mean that consumer wellbeing through higher
consumption will progress through green, clean and healthy strategies. Then the resource extraction can
continue and they only need to find a way to decouple the environment from economic activities. Of
course many of us by now realize that growth is not just a mind trap or convincing strategy for nation
building but an essential ingredient of the greed based governance model that wants to accumulate
wealth to retain power; they call it governance. Therefore, the brown economy policies need to be
greened, but the destination remains growth.

When civil society, particularly from the South, talk about equitable opportunities in green consumption
they expect poverty to be eradicated; equity is what they are calling for. The idea would be that
everyone consumes up to a level of justification of human wellbeing. While they would want poverty to
be eradicated, they would be skeptical that their governments with rapid economic growth policies
would be able to provide for wellbeing for all their citizens. At the end, the national economies will grow
with new market giants and a new emerging consumer class on earth while poverty remains a
convenient reality.
But, when people on the street talk about happiness they do not specifically ask their governments to
green grow the economy or provide them new green technology. When new green taxes are imposed or
regulations are tightened they get further confused. They want to know how all these good intentions of
greening the economy ends up making life of the common person more miserable than it was.

So can a green economy provide foundations for equity and sustainability on Earth? The answer lies
within the question if the Green Economy is founded to establish sustainable development or to find a
new market opportunity in green technology and to enhance green growth? Green technology is
growing fast and is becoming the next most profitable business on earth. In a growing international and
national climate regulatory regime, green technology will become the best market opportunity for the
industrialized countries and their big corporations to continue with their profit based motives of
business. Green growth will be exercised to keep the greed of accumulation continued in a different way
on earth. Therefore, the idea of green growth may not embark on distribution of the growing asserts to
create equitable consumption opportunities for all. In this context a green economy is looked with lot of
suspicion.

What we are asking for is a Sustainable Economy on earth. Why cannot this be discussed at Rio2012? A
Sustainable Economy (or a true Green Economy) should be an economic system that ensures social
equity, protects the ecological balance and creates economic sufficiency. In other words a Green
Economy should be the replacement of the current economic order of inequity, destruction and greed
that has kept half of the global people in poverty and created a potential climate catastrophe. The core
idea of a GE should be to enforce Sustainability as in wellbeing of all people and the biodiversity.

(Uchita de Zoysa is Executive Director of the Centre for Environment and Development and Convener of the Climate
Sustainability PLATFORM. Contact: uchita@sltnet.lk)