Towards a Green New Deal. Lessons after a lost decade

Abstract

In his essay, the author presents a stock-taking of the debate on Green Deals. The starting point of this personal assessment is a brief outline of the content and impact of a study in which the author and colleagues published a first outline of a “Green New Deal for Europe” as a political response to the 2008 financial crisis. 2008 had been a critical juncture for mainstream economics: however, from the perspective of policy-learning, the period after has been a lost decade. The European Green Deal as presented by the European Commission in 2019 can be perceived as a historic milestone and confirmation of a regime change in mainstream economic policy in which ecological considerations gain in importance. Yet, the Deal suffers from major deficits. In sum, the European Green Deal could be interpreted as an insufficient attempt to take advantage of the rapidly closing windows of opportunity for a peaceful transition towards sustainability. On the eve of a planetary crisis, the governance of economic transitions towards sustainability needs to be improved and accelerated. Reflecting on the 2009 study A Green New Deal for Europe, this essay attempts to draw a few lessons and frugal heuristics for the policy-design of Green Deals.

Mapping the social dimension of the European Green Deal

“…While some studies find that the EGD could substantively boost the creation of ‘green jobs’ (García Vaquero et al, 2021), provide major health and environmental benefits (Haines and Scheelbeek, 2020), create ‘green markets’ (Sikora, 2021) or support at least some ‘greening’ of the transport sector (Koralova-Nozharova, 2021), a broad literature also criticizes the EGD for not being sufficiently transformative. Here, some authors oscillate between hope and disappointment regarding the EGD's potential to develop into a Green New Deal with strong environmental and social impact (Kedward and Ryan-Collins, 2022; Schepelmann, 2022). Others stress the low compatibility of the EGD's green growth model with the de- or postgrowth approaches it would need to take in order to combat the climate crisis effectively (Haas et al, 2022; Ossewaarde and Ossewaarde-Lowtoo, 2020).…”