Recovery for the economy - and environment
Neil McInroy- LGC, 24th November 2008
He is visiting Poland, Portland, USA; Culiacan, Mexico; Coimbatore, India; Haiphong; Vietnam and Yokkaichi, Japan.This blog is written on a return break to Britain.
It is now over two years, following the launch of the Stern Review, that the then Chancellor Gordon Brown stated that the new objectives for the 21st century were threefold: "growth, full employment and environmental care."
Warren Hatter, in another LGC blog , gets it spot on - the downturn is an opportunity to kick start some thinking on sustainability and environmental care.
However, it would seem that, with the foundations of how we do economics quaking, that growth is coming out ahead as being the most important. In this, the danger is that the opportunity in the downturn, the opportunity to change institutional practice which straddles both the economic and the environment is going to be lost.
From, our research work, and the institutions we move within, CLES and myself are in a position where we are seeing the two paradigms and institutional cultures of economic and environment operating. For us at a time when they should be getting closer together, where thinking around the economy starts to move toward sustainability and working within environmental limits, economic thinking appears to be battening down the hatches.
In many economic institutions, including my own work, there is inevitably a lot of energy put to describing the effects of the downturn and coming up with action point plans. All to the aim of helping Local government and others to ease the problems in the economy and get us economically performing again.
However, of all the analysis and plans, about the downturn and what it means and what we need to do, I have seen very few references to the environment and our 80% carbon reduction target by 2050. For example the otherwise economically and pragmatically sensible LGA publication ‘from Recession to Recovery: the local dimension’ makes no reference to the environment, carbon reduction - not even a side reference. It begs the question as to what kind of recovery are we working toward? What about environmental care?
Now is the time to really start rethinking how we do local economics. A local government - which ‘place shields’ - needs to not just think about economic recovery, but start thinking about making new connections between the local economy and the environment.
This is not about just having the Co2 targets in the Local Area Agreement - though this is very important - its actually about institutional practice which allows the economic and environmental destiny of place and the dynamic between the two to be rethought and reshaped.
These are hard times and we need to think toward recovery in its fullest sense. This of course means protecting existing jobs in traditional sectors as well as developing the growth of sustainable economic activity. However it must also ensure that the recovery is protective of the environment and nurtures the very places we want to recover.
Available on the LGC website- click here.
