Across the world, billions of dollars are now spent annually to subsidise carbon-emitting fossil fuels. But investment in renewable energy remains inadequate², threatening affordable and secure energy supply³. Investment in the agricultural sector, including water and soil conservation, has actually declined in the last ten years in the developing world, threatening food security when the world’s major food producers have been subsidized to grow biofuels instead of food.

As the world emerges from recession, a clear message is emerging with it. ‘Business as usual’ is not working. In response, the ‘green economy’ (GE) movement has emerged. The idea of a...

To achieve the transitions promised by the green economy concept requires that environment is fully integrated in policy-development, planning, decision-taking and development investment-making. A wide array of tactics, tools and approaches for such integration is available, and the opportunities and challenges of mainstreaming the environment are discussed by Dalal-Clayton and Bass (2009) (see also www.environmental-mainstreaming.org).

Strategic environmental assessment (SEA) is an umbrella term for a range of analytical and participatory approaches that aim to integrate environmental (and linked social and economic) considerations into policies, plans and programmes and assess their potential development effectiveness and sustainability. SEA has emerged over the...

A World Bank report on greening growth through SEA argues that SEA is well placed to play four key roles in helping promote GE (Loayza et al., 2011) — because it:

Organises a process of dialogue:

between economic and environment/social communities;

gives a voice to the weak stakeholders and long term interests;

Provides information:

on the economic value of environmental services and assets;

on how to best combine short term and long term growth;

Helps identify how to improve institutions:

by analysing gaps and weaknesses;

by providing options for innovation and strengthening;

Prepares for change:

by addressing major trend and...

Indicators should be readily interpretable measures that tell us what is happening with regard to a particular issue. They can be divided roughly into two groups — those that express the state of affairs with regard to the issue, and those which portray trends with specific spatial scales and time horizons. Indicators can also be useful at the organizational level where they can help track and assess performance.

Policies that promote green growth need to be founded on a good understanding of the different factors that affect green growth, and appropriate information is needed to monitor progress and measure results....

The social dimension of sustainable development is often marginalized in green economy analysis and policy. For example, despite serious debate around ways in which equity, human rights and justice (critical factors in poverty reduction, pro-poor growth and environmental sustainability) can be integrated with economic or environmental priorities, these issues remain on the margins of the mainstream green economy agenda.

The UN Research Institute for Social Development (UNRISD) argues that questions about how green economy strategies impact different social groups and patterns of inequality are also sidelined; whose values, priorities and interests are shaping the concept and policies of green economy;...

An early issue that should arise in developing a GE-related PPP (or, in fact, any PPP, whether or not it is specifically for GE purposes) is whether an SEA is appropriate and relevant in relation to its development? (the screening step in Figure 1). Integral to this will be to establish the objectives and role of the SEA, particularly how it can improve the process of developing such a PPP. A key principle of an SEA is to explore alternatives. So the sooner an SEA is introduced in the PPP process, the greater will be the chances that it can...

The concept of the Green Economy has emerged recently following the world-wide economic crisis and in response to climate change issues and a range of persistent environmental challenges. In many ways, the idea of GE is synonymous with sustainable development — at least many of the actions necessary to progress towards the goal of GE are identical to those needed to move towards sustainable development. So what works well for sustainable development should be effective in promoting GE.

There already exists a wealth of experience of what is required to make progress towards sustainable development and what has been successful...