Green growth, a-growth or degrowth? Investigating the attitudes of environmental protection specialists at the German Environment Agency

Abstract

Green growth, a-growth, post-growth and degrowth are prominent concepts on the role of economic growth for achieving environmental sustainability. In this article, we investigate the attitudes of environmental protection specialists towards these concepts by conducting a survey with employees of the German Environment Agency (UBA). We develop three measures of attitudes towards the concepts: An implicit position based on responses to statements related to the debate on economic growth and the environment, a position choice based on choosing one concept without referring to its name and an explicit position based on choosing a concept with reference to its name. The analysis leads to four major results. (1) Environmental protection specialists predominantly express a preference for growth-critical concepts (a-growth/post-growth and degrowth) as compared to green growth. (2) A-growth/post-growth is the most favoured concept. (3) The results are stable for all three attitude-measures. (4) Specialists with more knowledge on the concepts are even more likely to prefer growth-critical concepts. Our results further support previous empirical findings that a large share of people and, in particular, specialists are in favour of growth-critical concepts, making policy-options towards such concepts more feasible.