New Green Industrial Policy Framework Targets Harmful Industries and Global Ecological Justice
Economic anthropologist at ICTA-UAB Dr Jason Hickel and political economist Dr Jostein Hauge have unveiled a ground-breaking new framework for green industrial policy, offering the first comprehensive blueprint to explicitly address scaling down harmful industries, organizing production for public benefit, and achieving global ecological justice.
In an era defined by global warming and ecological breakdown, the urgent need for robust 'green' industrial policy is widely acknowledged. However, existing policy frameworks have largely failed to address the unsustainable growth in energy and resource use prevalent in high-income economies, rendering them insufficient to meet critical ecological objectives.
"Existing approaches to green industrial policy fall short of tackling the ecological crisis at its roots," explains co-author Jostein Hauge. "Our new framework offers a progressive, comprehensive blueprint for actively scaling down harmful industries, reorienting production towards public benefit, and achieving true global ecological justice."
This novel framework fills a critical gap in the literature by integrating traditional green industrial policy perspectives with crucial insights from ecological economics and the growing fields of post-growth and degrowth. As a direct policy framework, the research holds significant potential to influence national and international policy development, guiding concrete actions towards a more sustainable future.
The paper is expected to stimulate vital further debate and research on how policy can effectively respond to unsustainable global growth in energy and resource consumption, ultimately aiming to drive meaningful policy action.