Publisher: Routledge
Year: 2015
Routledge has just published book by Ana-Maria Boromisa, Sanja Tišma and Anastasya Raditya Ležaić „Green jobs for sustainable development“.
The starting hypothesis is that creating green jobs (by state investment and subsidies, through good governance and with strong political support) is not sufficient to create green growth and sustainable development. Existing analyses show that green growth and economy provide jobs that are better and more sustainable than ordinary job. Our analysis has different perspective: we examine to which extent creation of green jobs supports overall economic development (as opposed to creation of elitist jobs and new marketing niche that can lead to widening the gap between rich and poor).
In all chapters we used the same approach. First we describe general concept, defined by international organisations. This is followed by presentation of national approaches and implementation in the United States, Canada, Japan, Republic of Korea, Mexico, the European Union, Brazil, Turkey and China. Based on common features and main differences we identify main driving forces and obstacles, formulate conclusions and recommendations.
The first chapter deals with green jobs. It outlines the concept of green jobs in international and national context and provides quantitative estimates of number of green jobs. The estimates are based on existing studies that use different approaches to defining and quantifying green jobs.
Next two chapters deal with green economy and green growth. As the green growth concept originates in Asia, the presentation of national approaches in the third chapter starts with Asian countries. This chapter also includes estimates on necessary investment to create green jobs which serve for a basis for outlining the green growth potential.
Defining sustainable development, the fourth chapter, gives insights on development of the concept and its treatment in agreements and documents such as the Millennium Development Goals, the document “The Future We Want” from Rio +20 Earth Summit, the previous Copenhagen Climate Conference outputs, etc. It serves as a basis for identification of the relationship between sustainable and green policies.
Green policies are in the focus of fifth chapter. It shows which policies and measures are designed to achieve goals related to green jobs, green growth and sustainable development. The ways of designing indicators for monitoring success of implementation and provide a basis for informed decision making is also provided.
The final chapter, on relationship between green jobs and sustainable developments answers the question whether the investment to create green jobs is wise or whether it will create just another “elite” jobs that not everyone could afford. It also further analyses the relations between the main findings of previous chapter and at the end presents main findings.
