ABSTRACT
Although it has only relatively recently become a buzzword in the lexicon of environmental discourse internationally, the origin of the ‘green economy’ concept dates back to the 1980s, when sustainable development was popularized in the wake of the 1987 report on Our Common Future by the World Commission on Environment and Development (WCED, 1987). Possibly the first detailed effort to operationalize the concept was a report for the UK government’s then Department of the Environment (Pearce et al., 1989). This environmental economic analysis examined different mechanisms for valuing the environment quantitatively in order to ensure that it was appropriately valued and included in economic decision-making as a set of resources rather than being exploited and polluted as something without specific value. Even environmental damage was to be valued. This report received wide acclaim, not least because the neoclassical economic approach underpinning the work offered market-based solutions and was thus more ideologically and politically acceptable. Despite the book’s title, its focus was explicitly on sustainable development; no definition of ‘green economy’ was offered and the term does not even appear in the index.
