Enabling a Flourishing Earth: Challenges for the Green Economy, Opportunities for Global Governance

By Klauss Bosselmann, Peter Brown and Brendan Mackey

In response to the agenda for Rio+20, we address here a major problem in sustainable development that brings together the issues of a green economy and institutional arrangements: how can we make more secure, abundant and widely shared those classes of public goods that are central to sustainable development but which cannot be satisfactorily addressed through market-based macroeconomic policy instruments? In addressing this question, we take as a presupposition that the international community’s search for more sustainable ways of living is to be guided by ethical principles as articulated in international hard and soft law, along with civil society declarations.