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The 2011 Green Growth Strategy provided initial guidance to governments on how to achieve economic growth and development, while preventing costly environmental damage and inefficient resource use. What progress have countries made in aligning economic and environmental priorities since 2011? This report attempts to evaluate this progress and highlight where there is broad scope to heighten the ambition and effectiveness of green growth policy. It draws lessons from green growth mainstreaming across the OECD’s work programme, notably in terms of how governments can maximise institutional settings to seize economic opportunities surrounding the transition to a green economy, and considers ways to enrich the Green Growth Strategy based on work undertaken since its launch.

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 the governments of OECD countries and partner economies 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 wellbeing. It recognises that risks to growth continue to rise as traditional growth models negatively affect the physical environment that ultimately underpins human well-being. In addition to the need for greater productivity growth, a growth agenda must take account of the consequences of productivity growth for the supporting physical environment. The need to ensure that growth is inclusive is a further pillar for growth.

This chapter surveys the considerable volume of OECD work relevant to green growth undertaken since release of the Green Growth Strategy in 2011, representing more than 130 OECD sectoral and issue-specific publications across virtually all applicable policy areas. Based on this work, as well as country experience to date (Chapter 2), the chapter proposes five enhancements to the Green Growth Strategy, to help ease country implementation, give renewed vigour and direction to country efforts, and provide an updated framework to guide policy work. The chapter concludes by proposing a number of forward work priorities related to green growth for governments, the OECD and other relevant institutions.

Towards Green Growth? Tracking Progress takes stock of country experience in implementing green growth since 2011. The 2011 OECD Green Growth Strategy provided important first guidance to governments on how to implement green growth by fostering economic growth and development, while ensuring that natural assets continue to provide the resources and environmental services vital to human well-being. Green growth implies transforming current modes of production and consumption across the entire economy at a global scale so as not to simply displace unsustainable production and consumption patterns. This report assesses common challenges experienced by OECD countries and partner economies since 2011 in aligning economic and environmental priorities for green growth. It seeks to accelerate progress by highlighting where there is scope to heighten the ambition and effectiveness of green growth policy in order to help countries seize available opportunities.

This chapter presents an overview of the 2011 Green Growth Strategy to provide the background to this report. The Green Growth Strategy 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. The four principle elements of the strategy are presented including: aligning economic and environmental objectives; implementing policy frameworks to price pollution and promote efficient resource use and aligning sector-specific policies with green growth objectives; addressing green growth’s social implications; and implementing mechanisms to evaluate and monitor progress.

This chapter describes how green growth is being implemented across the OECD work programme and examines how far the mainstreaming process has advanced since 2011, using OECD country surveillance series as a yardstick for progress across the Organisation (e.g. OECD Economic Surveys, Environmental Performance Reviews, Investment Policy Reviews and Reviews of Innovation Policy). The chapter draws a series of lessons from the rapid, but uneven mainstreaming process, to accelerate progress both at the OECD and for governments and other organisations working towards the mainstreaming of green growth.

This chapter provides a preliminary assessment of the major challenges to implementing green growth policy frameworks at the national level. The challenges are derived from the green growth policy recommendations contained in the country surveillance work that the OECD has completed since the release of the 2011 Green Growth Strategy (Economic Surveys, Environmental Policy Reviews, Investment Policy Reviews and Reviews of Innovation Policy). The most common green growth challenges relate to: implementing market instruments to price pollution and natural-resource use; orienting tax systems to advance green growth; designing environmentally relevant subsidies; and gearing sectoral policy towards green growth. The challenges are not exhaustive, but provide useful lessons for governments on how to accelerate and improve green growth policy implementation, and allow for the identification of a number of broader observations on country experience to date.