GREEN ECONOMY DEVELOPMENT: METHODOLOGICAL APPROACH

Abstract

The subject of this study is the principles, factors and features of the green economy as a complex multicomponent system. It was important to clarify the ontology of the term “development” and to propose a methodology for filling the meaning of this term with a specific scientific approach, which consisted in identifying factors that shape directed, natural (regular) and inevitable changes as mandatory elements of development in the philosophical sense of the latter. The article analyzes different approaches to the definition of green economy, which gave the authors a reason to propose their own perception of the green economy as a socio-eco-economic system, which should be simultaneous under directed, natural (regular) and inevitable changes to ensure its development. The authors dwelled on the characteristics of each of the three mandatory changes. Directed changes in the green economy as a system were considered through the prism of seventeen goals of sustainable development (defining those for which the green economy “works” directly), which form new requirements for key components of the economic system: production, exchange, distribution and consumption. Regular changes are characterized as those that correspond or do not contradict the basic economic laws of the post-industrial era and form the ecological basis for the competitiveness of the economy. Irreversibility of change is defined as justified regulatory measures of strict environmental and economic policy, based on the methodological, proven by scientists, the principle of regulation in a mixed economic system and the abandonment of free market mechanisms (which “does not work” to achieve sustainable development). The authors have proposed a system-hierarchical approach to ensuring intermediate principles of green economy development as a system (direction, regularity and irreversibility of changes) and their integral effect on the quality of sustainable development of the social system as a whole. Further directions of research of system principles of development of green economy have been defined as well.