The green economy as a sustainable alternative?

Abstract

This article explores the green economy as a sustainable alternative to austerity in Greece. The author argues that the movement towards the green economy has been hijacked by multinational corporations taking advantage of an austerity‐era policy that encourages a repetition of the neoliberal model of privatization, short‐term accumulation, rentier agreements and resource extraction. This is contrary to views that cast ‘crisis’ as an incubator of economic strategies that may feed green ecological transformations of the economy leading, ultimately, to sustainable growth. Current configurations of advanced capitalist power enable and promote injurious ‘green grabbing’, in part by leveraging the fantasy of a green economy as a solution to the fiscal crisis. As an alternative to austerity, the green economy requires further uncoupling from neoliberal business opportunism to allow natural capital to be harnessed as an economic asset for a sustainable long‐term public good.