Economy & Finance

Negotiations over the Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement (CETA) and the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) are being conducted as if they were private business deals. Trade policies, however, affect all of us and have implications for the global economy.

The expert symposium "Financing the Green Transformation" (May 5th, 2014) discussed how financial markets and investment practices could be transformed into more stable and sustainable systems. This documentation sums up the most important findings.

The "natural capital" concept is a trending topic and even companies like Coca-Cola attended the World Forum on Natural Capital 2013 in Edinburgh. But how does natural capital accounting really work?

As old methods have lost credibility, some governments, economists and international institutions like the UN Environment Programme have adopted a new approach, based on the view that nature is an “ecosystem service” provider. In doing so, they have shifted the onus of addressing environmental risk onto the private sector and market-based mechanisms.

At Rio+20, the concept of the "green economy" focuses on industrial production from biomass as one way to overcome fossil fuel dependency. The push for a bio-based economy comes with a call for market-based mechanisms for the financialization of the Earth’s natural processes, re-branded as ‘ecosystem services’, which also encourage land and water grabs. 

In this essay, the president of the Heinrich Boell Foundation, Barbara Unmuessig, critically reflects on the opportunities for and the shortcomings of the concept of a "Green Economy" to influence economic policy making globally, its relationship to the paradigm of sustainable development and the need to rethink our understanding and focus on growth.

One of the achievements of the UNFCCC negotiations in Cancun was the decision to establish a Green Climate Fund (GCF). This paper highlights design issues of the Fund and describes their implications. 

It is customary to divide society into three sectors, and what we want to show is how the new peer to peer dynamic unleashed by networked infrastructures, changes the inter-relationship between these three sectors. 

This conference report summarizes the key debates of the two-day conference "The Great Transformation - Greening the Economy". Additionally audio recordings of all sessions are available as well as video recordings of several key notes.