Growth

Our economy is obsessed with productivity and growth. How can we transform it into one built around a broader sense of prosperity? One that makes our lives worthwhile instead of destroying our planet?

Corporate lobby groups have created a broad network of influence channels around the G20, with the Business20 (B20) at its core. At the G20 Sherpa meeting in Frankfurt on 23-24 March the B20 presents its policy recommendations to the governments. It is time to counterbalance the corporate influence in the G20.

Apart from the G20’s apparent lack of effective strategy and implementation of its own pledges, its growth vision lacks full coherence with sustainable development. Instead of wishfully hoping to retrace an economic growth trajectory of the past, the G20 should advance coherent sustainable development.

Thomas Fatheuer, Lili Fuhr and Barbara Unmüßig of the Heinrich Böll Foundation set out to explore the basic assumptions, hypotheses and proposed solutions of the green economy and to illustrate and criticize their effects in practice.

"A new model of sustainability is needed, driven by ingenuity and the capacity of our technologies to extract more from less" says Anthony Giddens in his foreword to "Green Growth, Smart Growth".

During economic downturns, the debate about the limits of growth becomes increasingly important. The "décroissance" movement, which originated in France, proposes a departure from the model of a society based on a perpetually growing economy. Advocates of "decroissance" argue against growth in favour of “having less to live better” and propose an economic degrowth.