Contradictions, Contestations, and Challenges to the Green Economy

For almost half a century global climate policy has professed that economic growth and climate mitigation can co-occur by decoupling the global economy from environmental degradation vis-a-vis market-based solutions and more efficient technologies. This framework and the intellectual and political developments that co-produced it supported the notion of infinitely growing economies. In fact, the global climate policy frame would evolve to proclaim that economic growth was not only good for the environment but also a necessity for human development and the poorest in the global economy. However, almost two decades since the Kyoto Protocol came into force and the enactment of the first multi-national carbon market, global greenhouse gas emissions and raw material extraction are both at their highest recorded points in history. For scholars across the critical humanities, capitalism would not be able to green itself due to the imperative for growth and accumulation. This dissertation provides new developments and critiques to historical and present-day global political economy as it reaches new points of contradiction and expands in search of new frontiers of accumulation. I do this through an eclectic frame of study with a particular focus on global North and South relations. I do this through several approaches to the contradictions of climate change mitigation in the global political economy. First, I ground the so-called green economy in key politico-economic and intellectual enactments that took place in post-World War II reconstruction, following onto the sustainable development agenda that would institutionally and discursively marry the environment to economic growth and poverty alleviation in the global South. Second, the core of this dissertation provides new critical political economy interpretations of and objections to recent enactments in the green economy: green technology solutions such as electric vehicles over collective modes of transport, critical raw materials mining in the European peripheries and the push to mine international waters to fuel green technologies. Third, I take these contradictions as supporting cases for degrowing economies and consumption in the global North.

This dissertation is composed of five key chapters – adjacent to an introductory chapter, literature review chapter and concluding remarks. The opening chapters work to integrate this thesis into what I consider to be the macro debates surrounding the broader contentions and the contradictions of climate change mitigation under capitalism. The literature review establishes that there are ontological differences between the mainstream presentation of the Anthropocene, compared to critical politico-economic interpretations of the origins of the climate crisis as embedded in the longue durée of capitalism, its environment making practices, and the exploitation of not only non-human nature, but also other humans. Chapters Four, Five, and Six are thematically entwined while the complexity of the cases differ, they explore new frontiers of mining, both terrestrial and oceans mining – which is being carried out in the name of the green transition. Chapter Four explores two cases of civil society resistance to the EUs onshoring of mining in pursuit of its dual geopolitical and industrial aims and to facilitate the decarbonisation of the transport sector. The chapter explores the unequal distribution of ecological harms and economic benefits in mining frontiers from the frame of core-periphery relations within both EU and non-EU European countries. Chapter Five introduces the complex political economy and legal nexus of deep seabed mining, potentially the newest frontier of mining in which proponents employ the language of the green economy to gain tacit legitimacy for the yet accepted practice. The seabeds of international waters should be governed in the common interest of all of humanity and are also home to continental scales of raw materials needed for the proliferation of green technologies. As ongoing economic growth justified through promissory visions of green techno-utopian futures has steered mining into the most socially and ecologically fragile frontiers, Chapter Seven turns to the degrowth and post-growth literature. This chapter presents a case for high-income, high-consumption societies to de-grow economies and reduce materials footprints which would free up space and materials for low-income countries where more energy and material consumption may be necessary for human development.