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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 thatare green and clean. They would like to imply that consumers would be benefited by a cleaner planet

and a healthier life. Thats 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.

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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)