The UN, EU and G77 and the Green Economy - an Economy of Need or Greed after Rio+20?

This internship report is inspired by my stay as an intern at the Danish UN mission in New York working on – inter alia – the negotiations of Rio+20, the discussions on the UN Post-2015 Development Framework, and the 2012 ECOSOC Ministerial Declaration. It evolves around the research question: “Can the two ancient Greek concepts of economy - ‘oikonomia’ and ‘chrematisics’ - deployed as a set of Weberian ideal-types - be useful to an analysis of whether the Green Economy is an economy of ‘need’ or ‘greed’ after Rio+20?”
What I am interested in is to enhance the understanding of the most influential, though competing, discourses on the green economy, what they actually wish to denote with the word, and to what extent they have been able to shape policy agendas and influence development models. Hence, the aim with this project is to make a useful explanation of the contestations about the green economy, which took place at the United Nations Headquarters during my time there. Moreover, academic analysis of the concept of green economy seems especially relevant considering the continued global financial, economic, unemployment, and environmental crises and the disagreement among politicians, practitioners and academics about the appropriate remedies (Nielsen 2012). And lately, whether the downturn in economic growth in the developed countries can at all be turned around again (Nielsen 2013) or, from an ecological and normative perspective, whether it should be (Skidelsky & Skidelsky 2012).