Rethinking the Good Green Economy

Abstracts

Scotland’s Net Zero by 2045: Modeling metabolic potentials and scenarios toward emissions reductions.

Jean Boucher, The James Hutton Institute; with Keith Matthews

Societal metabolic analyses (SMA) offer a multi- and cross-scale method of understanding energetic and material flows at societal and other levels. SMA define and integrate views of: industrial sectors; workforce capacities; land use patterns; energy carriers and end uses; gross value added, and other primary material flows. Metabolic analyses can provide useful insights into options for social, economic, and energy policy instruments and to test their coherence as plans to move toward the ‘greening’ of economies, ‘green recoveries’, net zero, and a more ecologically just world. With the case of Scotland’s ‘net zero by 2045’, we use metabolic analyses to assess the challenges and tradeoffs in trying to maintain stable household and paid-work sectors while transitioning to electricity, other low carbon energy carriers and end uses, and while activating greener activities in land use and other industrial sectors. Through a number of different scenarios, we find Scotland to be extremely challenged by social and economic tradeoffs in its quest toward net zero by 2045. Scenarios include: status quo, net zero, progress to net zero, and degrowth. Other societal metabolic constraints and tradeoffs are discussed.

’Both-and’ versus ’either-or’: On the spatial organization of good economies around a wind farm

Daniel Nordstrand Frantzen, DTU - Technical University of Denmark

This paper explores successive waves of controversies around wind farm projects in the city of Hanstholm. Wind farm projects have been proposed several times as a means to finance expansions and modernizations of Hanstholm’s fishing harbor. Yet these projects have often been problematized by wind surfers, who claim that a surf spot located next to the harbor is among the best in the world and risks being compromised by the potential turbines as well as expansions of the harbor. 

Through the lens of ‘the good economy’ (Asdal et al. 2021) I explore how actors have sought to insert both the economy of the harbor and the economy of surfing into the local society in good ways. I am especially concerned with how actors are evaluating the co-presence of the harbor and surf economy: Do they find that the two economies are ‘compromising’ each other (Boltanski & Thévenot 2006)? Or that they can coexist in synergy (Mailhot & Langley 2017)?

I trace several spatial and material arrangements that actors have proposed during this ongoing controversy including ‘both-and’ solutions, as one interviewee calls it, where turbines are sited and designed so that they do not compromise wind surfing. Yet I also find ‘either-or’ arguments, which disregard the possibility of coexistence and calls for a prioritization of either the harbor economy or the surf economy. Based on the case I suggest that actors’ assessment of the good of an economy is highly dependent on how they evaluate this economy’s impact on other economies.

Alternative Agro-food Network and Greenhouse infrastructures: towards a community-based system for urban greenhouse growers in the Netherlands

Meilin Lyu, National and Kapodistrian University of Athens; with Stathis Arapostathis

Urbanisation, growing population pressure and extreme weather conditions could all contribute to food insecurity. In the context of greenhouse farming, vegetables are harvested in a controlled environment, resulting in high-quality production with minimum resources. Such green infrastructure has also become promising in urban areas and non-arable lands. In this paper, we investigate community-based greenhouses in the Netherlands specifically, where greenhouse facilities are managed by volunteers and local residents. The main part of our research involves conducting primary research studies, a mixed-method would be employed with the use of surveys, email responses, interviews, observational studies and site visits all around the Netherlands. The aims of the paper is to examine visions and expectations of community-based greenhouse as an alternative agro-ecological movement in our current food regime, its employment of smart technologies and its communicative social networks. Hence, the paper proposes that community-based greenhouse is a hands-on agricultural practice that relies heavily on trust relations and personal networks, where the direct relationships between two social actors, growers and consumers, can be fluid.

The Problem of the Problem of Upscaling

Cameron Roberts, University of Wisconsin Madison

The literature on technological upscaling estimates the rate at which new technologies can be adopted and deployed. In sustainability transitions literature, this kind of analysis is used to investigate how quickly various aspects of the “good green economy” (or at least an eco-modernist vision of it) can be realized. 

The scale-up agenda focuses on changing energy sources (Brand-Correa and Steinberger, 2017). For example, deployment of electric vehicles is assumed to displace gasoline-powered vehicles —a solution which would not mitigate many of the harms caused by car traffic (Jones, 2019). But we can also change energy services, for example by reducing our reliance on cars altogether.

What kinds of questions might we ask if we applied the empirical logic of scale-up research to these more radical approaches to decarbonizing? Instead of scale-up, we might study scale-down: The rate at which we can reduce demand or consumption of energy-intensive goods and services. We also might study scale-sideways: The conversion of existing infrastructure or production towards lower-carbon alternatives. There is abundant historical evidence that can be used to study both of these processes, and by studying it, we can develop climate scenarios that are less dependent on a green-growth outlook.

Citations:
Brand-Correa, L.I., Steinberger, J.K., 2017. A Framework for Decoupling Human Need Satisfaction From Energy Use. Ecological Economics 141, 43–52. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ecolecon.2017.05.019
Jones, S.J., 2019. If electric cars are the answer, what was the question? British Medical Bulletin 129, 13–23. https://doi.org/10.1093/bmb/ldy044