Description
Conventional wisdom holds that major international organisations (IOs) today actively promote states’ pursuit of ‘green growth’. In fact, many IOs officially embrace green growth in a paradigmatic way. However, I argue that IOs’ positions on economic growth tend to be fuzzier in practice than their public representation suggests. Specifically, this paper adopts a phenomenological approach to understanding what ‘green growth’ means for officials from the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) and the World Bank. To this end, I apply a coding technique inspired by grounded theory to over two dozen transcripts of interviews with OECD, UNEP and World Bank staff members, as well as public statements that represent the official line. Contrasting the views of IO staff members with their organisations’ promulgated stances reveals a surprising degree of fluidity of meanings attached to the ‘green growth’ label. While staff members routinely dismiss post-growth ideas on practical grounds, they often implicitly make claims that are broadly in line with such agendas on the spectrum from growth indifference/a-growth (fairly common) to growth critique/degrowth (less common). The analysis thus indicates that individual OECD, UNEP and World Bank staff members lean more towards non-mainstream views of economic growth than is widely assumed.
