Tuesday, December 10, 2013

Laske on the green economy

In this article Laske evaluates two texts on the green economy for dialectical thinking. One is more so than the other but both are deficient in left quadrant elaboration. He notes that in additional to right quadrant structures we also need "a change in the mind-sets of citizens in industrialized and emerging countries" (20). This entails "a new paradigm [...] driven by a rethink of the design purpose and intention of the system including all previous leverage points like goals, structure, rules, delays and parameters" (20). On 22 he lists some of the characteristics of this new paradigm:
"Dialectical thinking about governance and (green) economics needs to confront rather than to shy away from ethical debates on values and goals of our economic system. What is needed is to look at all the ingredients, not only parameters and rules, but also structures, goals and assumptions of our growth paradigms. Looking differently at progress, measuring costs of social and  environmental externalities beyond GDP is part of this. For a transformative 'living' green economy, it may be necessary to bring what is currently marginal in our economic system to its centre. For example, cultural concepts like care, precaution, conservation and sufficiency might be introduced. Concepts of governance need to revisit current privileges, incentives, constraints and punishments. This could include new negatives, i.e.corrective feedbacks and transparent information flows. Injecting life into a green economy could mean acknowledging and building on the power of the citizen’s domain of psychological and cultural identities and global citizenship."

Now whose agenda sounds like that, really?

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