https://orcid.org/0000-0001-9870-2294
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ABSTRACT
Policymakers and governments increasingly frame climate protection in terms of green growth, arguing that continued economic growth and climate protection are complementary and mutually beneficial. With such framing, governments hope to overcome the global common goods problem associated with climate change and to enable higher ambition on climate action within and across states. Yet, no empirical evidence to date has been provided on how widespread the support for green growth is in international climate politics. This paper, therefore, investigates which countries employ green growth framings at UNFCCC negotiations, and whether this relates to domestic factors, in particular economic structure, level of development and climate impacts. We conduct panel-data analysis on green growth positions derived from hand-coding a unique dataset of High-level Segment statements at the Convention of the Parties (COPs) from 2010 to 2019 for 151 countries. The results reveal that, to date, green growth proponents are those countries with the most advanced national clean energy technology (CET) capacities – as measured by the Green Complexity Index. The findings highlight that green growth is not promoted by all countries at international climate negotiations.
In international climate negotiations, climate protection is increasingly framed as a green growth opportunity to motivate global ambition.
Clean Energy Technology (CET) leading countries are more likely to use green growth framings than other less-technologically advanced peers and those with high exposure to climate risks.
Mechanisms to support green growth pathways for all countries should be scaled up, including technology transfer and finance to foster local capacities and human capital.
Given that green growth framings are not universally endorsed, further emphasis should be placed on additional co-benefits of climate action beyond economic growth, such as food and energy security, adaptation and resilience-building.
Key policy insights:
Acknowledgements
M.A., L.E. and S.W. acknowledge funding by the Investigating the Systemic Impacts of the Global Energy Transition (ISIGET) project financed by the Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) under the ‘Make our Planet Great Again – German Research Initiative’, grant number 57429628, implemented by the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD). L.S acknowledges the research advice received from Supervisor Karolina Milewicz on his Thesis during the MPhil International Relations at the Department of Politics and International Relations, University of Oxford, which formed the initial basis of this research. L.S further acknowledges the kind support by Benjamin E. Bagozzi in obtaining machine-readable versions of some of the High-level Segment Statements at the Conference of the Parties for the years between 2010 and 2012.
Author contributions
L.S. conducted the primary data collection and empirical analysis, developed the theoretical framework and contributed to drafting the introduction, literature review, discussion, conclusion and policy implications. SW, MA & LE contributed to drafting the paper with additional support during the editing and review processes. The author names are listed in descending order of their contribution to the study.
Disclosure statement
L.S. declares that this research has been conducted strictly in his personal capacity, and has at no time been associated with or benefitted from his professional positions occupied at the UNFCCC MOI division as individual contractor and intern during periods of the years 2020–2023. Neither official working hours, formal or informal exchanges, nor any type of funding with regards to the writing of this study have been associated with the UNFCCC.
Notes
1 The paper understands clean energy technologies (CETs) as the set of technologies that have the potential to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Among these are energy efficiency technologies in transport, building and industrial sectors, as well as sustainable energy generation. The International Energy Agency (IEA) specifies that countries with innovative low-carbon economies are assumed to be those most active in areas of clean-tech patenting, research and development (R&D) activities, CET manufacturing and export, as well as international cooperation initiatives (IEA, Citation2020a, p. 37).
2 HLS for the year 2014 are not publicly available and therefore fall out of the sample.
3 See Table A1 (Supplementary Material) for descriptive statistics of the unbalanced panel dataset.
4 For more information, see Figure 10 ‘The Green Product Space’ in Mealy and Teytelboym (Citation2020). To illustrate the diversity of products covered to assess countries’ green economic potential, these can include heliostats, measuring instruments, optical devices, batteries, bicycles, organic textiles, packaging and oils, electrical transformers, turbines, ammonia production or energy efficiency products such as LED lamps.
5 These countries, that often lack information also on other covariates, are listed by world region in Table A2 (Supplementary Material).
6 A variety of further partially overlapping groupings exist, such as AILAC and the LDC (least-developed country) sub-grouping of G77 countries, but for reasons of parsimony, these most pertinent groupings have been included in the analysis.
7 It is likely that missing countries in the GCI are ‘missing not at random’ (MNRA): the probability that an observation is missing is very likely to be related to its value. Countries not included in the GCI can be assumed to be those with less data availability or with marginal importance in the green economy, thus more likely to be in the lower spectrum of the score.
8 Annex 2 details pre-processing steps and removed words and dictionaries applied for sentiment and keyness analysis.
9 Based on Table A3 diagnostic tests conducted for the panel data (Supplementary Material).
10 Umbrella group convenes Australia, Canada, Iceland, Israel, Japan, New Zealand, Kazakhstan, Norway, Ukraine and the United States. EIG group entails Mexico, Liechtenstein, Monaco, the Republic of Korea, Switzerland and Georgia.