Towards Green Growth? Tracking Progress - Key Findings and Recommendations

Taking stock to move the green growth agenda forward The 2011 Green Growth Strategy: 'green' and 'growth' must go hand-in-hand. In 2009, OECD Ministers asked the OECD to develop a Green Growth Strategy to help OECD and partner-country governments alike achieve economic recovery along with environmentally and socially sustainable growth. The 2011 Green Growth Strategy responded to this mandate. It sets a framework for governments to foster economic growth and development, while ensuring that natural assets continue to provide the resources and environmental services vital to human well-being. In addition to the need for Green Growth: fostering economic greater productivity growth, a growth agenda must growth and development; take account of the consequences of productivity ensuring that natural assets growth for the supporting physical environment. The continue to provide resources and need to ensure that growth is inclusive is a further environmental services vital to pillar for growth. human well-being

Towards Green Growth? Tracking Progress takes stock of country experience in implementing green growth since 2011. It assesses common challenges experienced by OECD countries and partner economies since 2011 in aligning economic and environmental priorities for green growth.

The report seeks to accelerate progress by highlighting where there is broad scope to heighten the ambition and effectiveness of green growth policy, to help countries draw lessons from implementation efforts to date and seize available economic opportunities. Opportunities can arise from the expansion of markets for green technologies and services, improved market confidence from environmental policy clarity, incentives for innovation, efficient management of natural resources and other productivity gains.

Revisiting the Green Growth Strategy to enhance well-being. The 2011 Green Growth Strategy recognised green growth policy design as work in progress; OECD work has deepened across the many relevant disciplines since 2011. Towards Green Growth? Tracking Progress surveys the work undertaken and considers the extent to which the Green Growth Strategy can be reviewed and strengthened by the analysis performed, as well as lessons from country implementation efforts to date.

Great strides have been made in mainstreaming green growth, but progress is uneven. The OECD has made a concerted and sustained effort to integrate green growth across its work programme; its experience shows that institutional settings matter. To implement green growth, governments will need to drive institutional changes to integrate economic and environmental decision-making, and ensure co-ordination across core policy areas similar to those being implemented by the OECD. That makes the OECD’s experience instructive.

The ultimate aim of the report is to accelerate countries’ implementation of green growth policies by providing more targeted and coherent policy advice. This brochure brings together the main findings of the report, delivered to the OECD Ministerial Council Meeting in June 2015, and corresponding recommendations for governments.

The OECD’s Green Growth Strategy fully recognises the role of natural capital in economic growth and human well-being. As such, Towards Green Growth? Tracking Progress forms part of the Organisation’s broader input to major environmental policy milestones, including the United Nations Conference on Climate Change and negotiation of the Post-2015 development agenda, as well as environmental work being undertaken in the context of other international forums, such as the G20.

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