Constructing Meanings of a Green Economy: Investigation of an Argument for Africa’s Transition towards the Green Economy

Relevance to Development Studies 
The Environment and Sustainable Development (ESD) specialization is concerned with global 
environmental politics and the debates surrounding current concepts and frameworks for envi-
ronmental policy. The Green Economy is such a topic, emerging as a proposed new paradigm 
for the achievement of sustainable development. As it stands the concept is not clearly defined, 
remains contested and therefore allows multiple perspectives for understanding and implement-
ing it. This study explores but one such perspective, providing an insight into alternative con-
structions of multiple meanings and hence definitions of the Green Economy while reflecting on 
the power of deliberate language use in constructing these but also render them irrelevant in the 
prolonged absence of a consensus on the concept’s meaning. 
Keywords 
Green Economy, Africa, Sustainable Development, Argumentation Analysis, Framing, Meles 
Zenawi 

---

 1 
Chapter 1
Introduction
Just over 30 years ago “The Limits to Growth” report (Meadows et al. 1972) made the sali-
ent warning that humanity could not continue consuming physical resources and grow in popula-
tion at a rate faster than that which nature could support, lest it find itself in a state of collapse , 
which could be of economic, ecological and social dimensions. Over the last decade or so, the 
world has fallen victim to a range of crises that happened in quick succession only to later con-
verge into a multi-faceted crisis we face today. The climate, food and financial crises for instance, 
can be seen as signals that the planetary ‘limits to growth’ as warned by Meadows et al. (1972) are 
indeed being approached by our current global systems of development.
Meadows et al. (1972) went on to suggest that prompt, global decision making needed to be 
made in order to reduce these growth rates and avoid collapse, emphasizing that delays in this 
process would only increase the chances of the collapse becoming a reality midway through the 
21
st
century if business continued “as usual”. The latest proposition to emerge from such global 
decision making spaces in response to looming threats to growth is that a shift be made towards 
an economic system that results in improved human well-being and social equity, while signifi-
cantly reducing environmental risks and ecological scarcities (UNEP 2011) i.e. towards a Green 
Economy.
With such an appealing target and the similarly attractive idea that such balanced sustainabil-
ity can be achieved without discontinuing economic growth, the Green Economy is gathering 
momentum as a “three birds, one stone” sustainable solution to the multiple crises (Barbier et al. 
2013). The Green Economy has been a prominent feature of international environmental policy 
gatherings since 2008. 
However, the idea of linking the economy, environment and society so as to proceed with 
development in an integrative manner and in the hope of countering signals that the planetary 
‘limits to growth’ are approaching precedes this contemporary concept that is the Green Econ-
omy. The concept’s precursor, sustainable development, sought to achieve these same objectives 
when it emerged in the late 1980s although it never proposed a pathway quite as detailed as the 
Green Economy’s (Brockington 2012). The Green Economy in fact is considered