With environmental issues increasingly seen through economic and social perspectives, many governments around the world are now looking to green growth strategies as a way to kick-start and accelerate investment in new technologies and industries. This paper, produced by the Green Growth Best Practice initiative (GGBP), represents a synthesis of the key findings of the GGBP 2014 report, which saw multiple teams of experts reviewing 60 specific government programmes, combined with a literature review.
Green growth strategies are driven by a number of factors, including possible improvements in productivity, new growth opportunities, increasing resource scarcity, improving quality of life and social equity, and reducing policy uncertainty to unlock investment. No single approach has been used universally; rather, different strategies tend to share common features and elements.
Emerging lessons from best practices identified in the report include:
Planning and coordination processes requires clear institutional mandates, high-level leadership, and active stakeholder engagement.
Clear visions, targets, and baselines should be ambitious, yet achievable. Targets work best when aligned with domestic interests, and close links between budgetary and policy design should be maintained to ensure accountability.
Robust and balanced analysis and communication of green growth benefits should identify synergies, integrate a variety of approaches, and engage credible, trusted messengers to target a broad audience.
Prioritising options and constructing credible pathways should take into account local contexts, combine top-down and bottom-up approaches, and use iterative processes that includes scenario building.
Design portfolios should address multiple goals, responding to market failures and political economy challenges. Efforts should focus on decoupling economic growth from environmental and resource depletion.
Design public finance instruments to overcome barriers and mobilise private investment into green growth sectors. These should include mitigating risk, boosting and creating new markets, and innovative financing, e.g. through green bonds and regulatory reforms.
Harnessing the power of public-private collaboration with a focus on shared goals such as innovation, efficiency, productivity, and transparency is important, particularly for large-scale infrastructure projects. Collaboration in research among academic, business, government and international agencies, and the ensuring of long-term commitment from all parties, are also crucial.National and sub-national integration is vital, requiring adequate powers, budgets, human and technical resources, and peer-to-peer learning.
Building and maintaining robust monitoring and evaluation systems is also vital to enhance learning, decision-making, accountability, and improving public confidence. Information should be widely shared, in an understandable and timely manner.