The Green Economy in the Global South

Stefano Ponte, Daniel Brockington

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9781138291201
• eBook ISBN: 9781351854580
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

The idea and practice of the 'green economy' is gaining momentum, coinciding with financial instability and continued economic woe in the Global North, but generally more positive economic circumstances in the Global South. 'Green economic initiatives' in the Global South are multiplying, and include carbon payments, ecotourism, community-based wildlife management, sustainability certification initiatives, and offsets by mining companies exploiting new resources. These initiatives are reallocating resources, redefining inequalities and redistributing the fortune and misfortune of participants of the green economy and those excluded from it. They have also led to resistance – locally, nationally, and transnationally – and to demands for alternatives to market-driven instruments and solutions, which are generally gaining strength and coherence. The articles included in this volume bring together a multi-disciplinary team of scholars from North and South to provide nuanced analyses of green economy experiences in the Global South – analysing the opportunities they provide, but also the redistributions they entail and the kinds of resistances they face. The ultimate aim of the collection is to provide a critical, but balanced, overview of the emerging green economy in the Global South and point the way to possible adjustments, alternatives or radical resistance, depending on different situations. This book was originally published as a special issue of Third World Quarterly.

The Green Economy in the global South: experiences, redistributions and resistance

Dan Brockington^a and Stefano Ponte^b

^aInstitute for Development Policy and Management, University of Manchester; ^bDepartment of Business and Politics, Copenhagen Business School, Denmark

As multiple visions for a Green Economy seek to become real, so are green economic initiatives in the global South multiplying. These can offer integration into wealth-generating markets – as well as displacement, alienation, conflict and opportunities for ‘green washing’. The articles included in this collection bring together a multidisciplinary team of scholars and a range of case studies, from forestry governance to tourism to carbon finance, to provide nuanced analyses of Green Economy experiences in the global South – examining the opportunities they provide, the redistributions they entail and the kinds of resistance they face.

Introduction

The momentum gathering behind the idea and practice of the ‘Green Economy’ is coinciding with financial instability and continued economic woe in the global North, but generally more positive economic circumstances in the global South. Green Economy initiatives in the global South are multiplying, and include carbon payments, ecotourism, community-based wildlife management, sustainability certification initiatives and offsets by mining companies exploiting new resources. These are all part of a landscape offering new commodities, opportunities for commercialisation and possible integration into wealth-generating markets. But so too are growing incidents of land and water grabbing, displacement and alienation of resources required for wealthy tourists, conflicts over locally defined rules of access to carbon purchased by wealthy foreigners and instances of ‘green washing’ and other harmful activities. The Green Economy is reallocating resources, reinforcing inequalities and redistributing the fortune and misfortune of its participants and of those excluded from it. The articles included in this special issue bring together a multidisciplinary team of scholars to provide nuanced analyses of Green Economy experiences in the global South – examining the opportunities they provide, the redistributions they entail and the kinds of resistance they may face.

Behind the Green Economy lies a bundle of paradoxes and contradictions. The term is both a rallying call for radical change to the organisation of economic activity and social life, and an instrument by which meaningful alterations of either is resisted. It is a nascent idea, a future scenario, and yet projects in its name are transforming rural and urban realities in many locations in the global South. The Green Economy includes different epistemic communities, who seem to barely know each other, and is a field of vigorously contested interpretations. It demands attention, yet its breadth and multiple meanings make rigorous analysis hard. It is a fecund, sometimes febrile, arena of new scholarship.¹

The growing vigour of the topic is plain. Brown and colleagues trace the rise in writing on the Green Economy from 12 papers in 2004–05 to over 50 times that number eight years later.² These works examine specific sectors in particular countries, advances in new technologies, discursive formations, political battles within international institutions, and blueprints for how to transition to green (or at least greener) economic activity. The addition to the breadth that this collection provides is its focus on the dilemmas the Green Economy throws up in diverse situations in selected economies, societies and political institutions in the global South.

We are not presuming to generalise across the Global South. Indeed, Carl Death’s article specifically seeks to disaggregate the variety of responses to the Green Economy that can be found there. But we do see in these economies a series of different perspectives and patterns of practice that are more rarely encountered in the global North. For example, in Latin America more radical versions of the Green Economy are being explored, if only discursively, that entail looking beyond measures of mere GDP to determine prosperity. Elsewhere, and particularly in many African countries, moves towards a Green Economy are more modest and viewed with some distrust, precisely because they are perceived to threaten growth opportunities. As Faccer and colleagues make clear, economies that are built on extracting natural resources, are developing new coal deposits and producing more energy cheaply, and have large sections of their population seeking employment and ways out of poverty, will be less prone to consider potentially more expensive development trajectories.³ Yet, at the same time, moves to promote particular forms of the Green Economy – ecotourism, carbon offsets and community-based natural resource management – find all sorts of new venues in which to emerge in various countries and communities of the global South. As the articles in this collection will show, despite governments’ scepticism, moves towards a Green Economy have teeth and presence in these locations that are more visible than in the global North.

One of the reasons for the Green Economy’s visibility in the global South is that tropical deforestation is seen as one of the low-hanging fruit that can be targeted rapidly to reduce carbon emissions. Such deforestation is one of the major causes of carbon emissions (it was at the time of the Stern report thought to be the most important); dealing with it was thought to be relatively cheap and certainly politically much easier than tackling, for instance, car use in industrialised countries. This would explain the remarkably consistent line that appears in a series of different celebrities’ messages on behalf of conservation organisations, with all proclaiming that tropical deforestation causes more carbon emissions than ‘all the cars, trucks and planes in the world combined’.⁴ Thus landscapes and economies in the global South become vital actors in the defence of lifestyles in the global North. Another reason for the visibility and tangibility of the Green Economy in the global South is that practices such as payments for ecosystem services, green finance and ecotourism are materially manifest there. These practices result in new commodities, revenue streams, value chains, financial instruments and governance arrangements that are reshaping resource use and management at the local, and occasionally national and transnational, levels.

In addition to the actual Green Economy activities forming in the global South, there is also an important history of academic interest in their predecessor activities in this realm. Many of the measures that are now badged as Green Economy have a previous gestation in the form of a series of interactions between environmental affairs and the functioning of capitalism. These have been tackled by scholars writing about the ‘neoliberalisation of nature’ and neoliberal conservation, and contain many aspects (payments for ecosystem services, the use of markets to govern natural resources and environmental problems) that are now promoted as part of a Green Economy – this time in the context of growing acceptance of the role of the state in governing economic and environmental affairs. And yet, as is so often the case, authors and locations of this debate have been based mostly in the global North.

This had been notably the case among the epistemic community that lies behind the present collection, which gathered in 2008 at meetings in Manchester and Washington, DC, with subsequent gatherings in Lund, Sweden, The Hague and Toronto. These were all lively, vibrant conferences and workshops with vigorous debate and important publications deriving from them.⁵ They became larger with each iteration, and helped to successfully develop critical academic thinking in this area – together with other efforts at the meetings of professional associations of geographers, anthropologists and development studies in the USA and UK. But these were not South-based endeavours.

Our point in observing this imbalance is not that intellectual endeavours about the South have to be written from it, or by its residents.⁶ We do not subscribe to such simplistic notions of authenticity or authority. The freedoms of international academia mean that we are not bound by the contingencies of location in our research. But international intellectual agendas are likely to work better if they involve different parts of the world more equally. If the limitations of funding and visas constrain intellectual networks, then the communities resulting are stunted. It matters particularly for any scholars who are trying not just to analyse for intellectual audiences, but also to engage and work with the communities about whom they write. Those sorts of interactions are harder if so much of the intellectual activity is in a different hemisphere, and if the academic communities in which they take part are similarly biased.

The articles included in this collection derive from an attempt at least partially to redress this imbalance. Earlier versions of these papers were presented at the ‘Green Economy in the South’ conference, which was held in July 2014 at the University of Dodoma in Tanzania, and hosted by its Department of Geography and Environmental Sciences. Once again, our point is not that this makes the meeting any more authentic or authoritative. Indeed, it became plain that there are far more enduring inequalities at work than merely hosting a meeting in Dodoma can overcome. It proved too hard to arrange travel and visa documents for applicants based in the Democratic Republic of Congo. Applications from North-based scholars were still more numerous than those based in the South and, even if it is closer to many potential participants, Dodoma can still be hard and expensive to get to. To the extent that our goal of hosting a more inclusive conference was achieved, it was only possible because of generous sponsorship. Nevertheless, the result was that over 70 people attended from nearly 30 countries. Because of the high quality of the venue, the strong media coverage the conference attracted, and the measures the hosts took to welcome and cater for delegates’ needs, this meeting did succeed in providing a vigorous and lively international conference with broader geographic participation.

The articles included in this collection are but a fraction of those presented at the conference. They provide a number of critical perspectives – focusing on what kinds of power realignments and redistribution of resources take place under the aegis of the Green Economy, and examining the extent to which support and resistance play out in a variety of settings and who is involved. They also help to demonstrate some of the existing research gaps and suggest future directions required by the epistemic community that has produced them, which we briefly address at the end of this introduction.

The articles

Carl Death’s article, ‘Four discourses of the Green Economy in the global South’, sets the scene by disaggregating the different discourses of the Green Economy predominant in selected countries in the global South. Death argues that, while the concept is often deployed in a consensual and win-win manner, we need to understand Green Economy discourses as part of a broader political economy of the ‘green state’ in the global South. The first of four discourses he highlights is ‘green resilience’, which seeks ways to strengthen local and national economies to cope with the threats of climate change while delivering economic growth (with Ethiopia as the main example). The second, visible in China and India, is ‘green growth’, in which the transformations required to make economies greener are embraced as potential means of increasing the volume of transactions and economic activity. The third, ‘green transformation’, exemplified by aspects of South Korea’s green stimulus policies, refers to states seeking to invest considerable resources into reshaping their economies to make them greener.⁷ The fourth and last, ‘green revolution’, invokes the possibility of more radical change, and possibly even de-growth, which the author has observed especially in Brazil. Tracing this variety allows Death to highlight important commonalities: first, that the state is important in shaping and directing discourse and policies – even social movements’ radical discourses often seek recognition and support from state institutions; and, second, that all these discourses are compatible with perpetuated inequalities.

Three articles included in this collection critically examine the role of tourism in the Green Economy. Melanie Ströbel’s article, ‘Tourism and the Green Economy: inspiring or averting change?’, examines the efforts of the tourism industry to promote green growth. Tourism matters a great deal because it is one of the main ways in which ecosystem services can be paid for – wealthy tourists are prepared to part with significant sums to protect landscapes, water supplies, forests and so on. The industry can provide an effective means of directly transferring resources from richer visitors to poorer residents. Ströbel shows clearly that advocates of the tourism industry do not hesitate to claim those benefits. They also claim that tourism needs to increase in order to provide mor...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Citation Information
• Notes on Contributors
• 1. The Green Economy in the global South: experiences, redistributions and resistance
• 2. Four discourses of the green economy in the global South
• 3. Tourism and the green economy: inspiring or averting change?
• 4. Suspended redistribution: ‘green economy’ and water inequality in the Waterberg, South Africa
• 5. Extractive philanthropy: securing labour and land claim settlements in private nature reserves
• 6. Responding to the green economy: how REDD+ and the One Map Initiative are transforming forest governance in Indonesia
• 7. The neoliberalisation of forestry governance, market environmentalism and re-territorialisation in Uganda
• 8. Inverting the moral economy: the case of land acquisitions for forest plantations in Tanzania
• 9. Performativity in the Green Economy: how far does climate finance create a fictive economy?
• Index