The Emergence of the Green Economy and the Rise of 'Internal Environmental Conflicts'

Abstract

In the last few years, the emergence of the green economy has been coupled with the progressive introduction of several economic instruments aimed at facilitating the fulfilment of their international environmental commitments by the Parties to several environmental law conventions. Within such a reference scenario, the working paper presents the origin and main features of the green economy and discusses the close relationship existing between the green economy and sustainable development concepts.Building on such a preliminary analysis, it then focuses on the flexibility mechanisms introduced by the Kyoto Protocol on climate change, which are identified as paradigmatic examples of green economy tools. In such a context, it is highlighted that despite their positive features, those flexibility mechanisms, if considered from an environmental protection point of view, may cause an imbalance between potentially conflicting interests relating, on the one side, to the investment promotion plus the contribution to the fight against climate change as opposed, on the other side, to the protection of the environment in a more traditional and general sense. Such a structural imbalance may give rise to a new type of investment versus environment conflict, characterised by an internal environmental dimension, which is defined as “internal environmental conflict”. In this respect, it is noted that the new type of internal environmental conflicts cannot be properly managed by means of the traditional criteria and instruments which have been used so far to deal with the traditional investment vs. environment conflicts. Therefore, it is proposed that, in order to efficiently manage and solve such a new type of conflict, a new interpretative paradigm is adopted, which consists in the concept of ecological sustainability.