Boehnert Dec 2014-Accepted for journal. Environmental Communication.pdf (15.15 MB)
The green economy: Reconceptualizing the natural commons as natural capital
journal contribution
posted on 2018-09-27, 10:27 authored by Joanna BoehnertThe 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 CommunicationVolume
10Issue
4Pages
395 - 417Citation
BOEHNERT, J., 2016. The green economy: Reconceptualizing the natural commons as natural capital. Environmental Communication, 10(4), pp. 395-417.Publisher
© Taylor and FrancisVersion
- 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
2015-03-13Notes
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
1752-4032eISSN
1752-4040Publisher version
Language
- en