Loughborough University
Browse
Boehnert Dec 2014-Accepted for journal. Environmental Communication.pdf (15.15 MB)

The green economy: Reconceptualizing the natural commons as natural capital

Download (15.15 MB)
journal contribution
posted on 2018-09-27, 10:27 authored by Joanna Boehnert
The green economy is an emergent approach to sustainable development launched at Rio+20. Herein environmental decision-making is increasingly achieved through economistic processes and logic. The natural commons is quantified and managed as natural capital. This paper summarizes the trajectory of the project and its ideological framework. It examines various conceptualizations of economic approaches to the environment and considers philosophical, methodological and political problems associated with the green economy project. In the face of very different definitions of what constitutes a green economy, environmental communicators face a situation characterized by discursive confusion as the complexity of natural capital accounting processes conceal new political configurations. Counter-movements argue that the green economy program is performing ideological work that uses the language of the environmentalism to obscure an intensified agenda of neoliberal governance and capital accumulation. The concept now has contradictory meanings. Environmental communicators have an important role to play in exposing the contested nature of the project and in helping to define the emerging green economy.

Funding

This research was supported by the Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences at University of Colorado Boulder.

History

School

  • The Arts, English and Drama

Department

  • Arts

Published in

Environmental Communication

Volume

10

Issue

4

Pages

395 - 417

Citation

BOEHNERT, J., 2016. The green economy: Reconceptualizing the natural commons as natural capital. Environmental Communication, 10(4), pp. 395-417.

Publisher

© Taylor and Francis

Version

  • AM (Accepted Manuscript)

Publisher statement

This work is made available according to the conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0) licence. Full details of this licence are available at: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/

Publication date

2015-03-13

Notes

This is an Accepted Manuscript of an article published by Taylor & Francis in Environmental Communication on 13th Mar 2015, available online: https://doi.org/10.1080/17524032.2015.1018296.

ISSN

1752-4032

eISSN

1752-4040

Language

  • en