Green economies in the Global South: framings, experiences, and immanent challenges

This chapter takes stock of green economies in the Global South and assesses their prospects as sustainable development strategies. The discourses, narratives, and framings associated with ‘southern’ green economies are reviewed, compared, and situated along a gradient of weak-to-strong sustainability. On-going progress in implementing green strategies is then examined with a focus on the experiences of Asia, Latin America, and sub-Saharan Africa. Building off this discussion, the chapter then highlights five immanent conditions that shape the prospects for green economy transitions in the Global South: (a) stalled industrial development; (b) highly uneven distributions of infrastructure; (c) large informal economies; (d) ineffective governance; and (e) limited green-economy subject formations. Such conditions cannot simply be bypassed through technological leapfrogging, they must be addressed as critical dimensions of green economy initiatives. The chapter closes with pressing research concerns moving forward and call to move beyond Westernized teleologies or essentialisms of how economic development is meant to progress, and toward frameworks that can enable scholars to concretely understand the forces, relations, actors, and structures that shape the contemporary constitution and evolution of southern economies. One such approach is briefly introduced as an illustration.