The green economy: a wolf in sheep’s clothing or an alternative development path in South Africa?

Abstract

We need to debate the construction of an alternative development path globally because the existing model of neo-liberal capitalism involves deepening social inequality and ecological degradation. The climate crisis is deepening. Despite 17 years of negotiations there is no binding global agreement on the reduction of carbon emissions. In fact carbon emissions are rising, which means climate change is intensifying and having devastating impacts – particularly on the working class – in the form of rising food prices, water shortages, crop failures and so on. Sub-Saharan Africa will be the worst affected. With a carbon-intense economy, South Africa is one of the worst con-tributors to the climate crisis. Since 1995 inequality has deepened to make us the most unequal of all major countries in the world, with a Gini coefficient of 0.7. Even the first report of the neo-liberal National Planning Commission (NPC 2011: 18) concluded, that ‘there are already good reasons to seek to build a new development path that is more inclusive, less dependent on the exploitation of non-renewable resources and that uses renewable resources more sustainably and strategically’. Very recently the South African labour movement expressed its commit-ment to a ‘just transition’. However, this is contentious, with very different understandings of the scale and nature of the changes involved. A just transition to a low-carbon economy could be either defensive, involving demands for shallow change focused on protecting vulnerable workers, or alternatively deep, transformative change involving demands for dramatically different forms of production and consumption. In this sense the ecological crisis represents an opportunity to demand the redistribution of power and resources, to challenge the conventional understanding of economic growth and to create an alternative development path. This alternative development path is sometimes framed as a ‘green economy’.However, at present the green economy is an empty signifier. Everything depends on who claims it and gets to fill it with meaning. The centralquestion addressed in this chapter is whether the concept of the green economy could provide such a new development path, or whether it is what Lander (2011) has termed ‘a wolf in sheep’s clothing’ – the ‘wolf ’ being green neo-liberal capitalism.