the prospects for a green economy in croatia paul stubbs

7/28/2019 The Prospects for a Green Economy in Croatia Paul Stubbs

1/3

greeneuropeanjournal.eu http://www.greeneuropeanjournal.eu/the-prospects-for-a-green-economy-in-croatia/

The prospects for a green economy in Croatia

In the debate / 01/07/2013

Can Croat ias entry to the European Union create an opportunity to change the countrys economic and

ecological paradigms? For Paul Stubbs, that po tent ial exists, but will only succeed if new political alliances

are created that bring to gether a broad range of social movements.

Author

Paul Stubbs is a Senior Research Fellow at the Inst itute o f Economics (Zagreb). He holds of

PhD f rom the University o f Bath (UK) and is widely published on the topic of social policy in the

Balkans.

Croat ia became the 28th Member State o f the European Union on 1 July 2013, in the middle of the biggest

crisis the EU has f aced in its lifet ime. Instead of the optimism of mos t previous waves of enlargement:

notably when Spain and Portugal emerged f rom dictatorships and joined in 1986, and 8 pos t- communist

count ries joined in 2004, there is a real quest ion mark about what membership will mean for Croatia and

what Croatia will mean, if anything, for the EU. Croatia is a small state, so that t he tot al population of the

EU will grow by less than 1%. The concern is less about the idea, mos t f orcef ully expressed in the case of

Bulgaria and Romania in 2007, that a count ry is joining which is not ready for membership, although some

of that is in the air not least around the vexed questions of corruption, human rights, and lack of

enthuiasm f or key reforms. Instead, the uncertainty appears to be more f ocused on what kind of European

Union will emerge in the f uture and how the new hegemonic austerity politics o f the core Member States, in

alliance with DG Economics and Finance, the IMF, the ECB, and others, will impact o n Croat ia. In the f if th

year of a deep recession, the f ear is of ten expressed that Croatia will not receive the boost in fo reigndirect investment which EU membership is meant to bring, will fail to implement s tructural ref orms, and may

be targeted f or disciplinary austerity much as many of her Southern European neighbours have recently.

A space for alternatives

Much less of ten discussed is the balance between the economic aspects of membership and the

environmental and social dimensions. Whilst the Europe 2020 strategy still talks of growth and jobs as

central to the European project, the insistence on sustainable and inclusive growth does, at least, of f er a

potential space for a dif f erent model of development than the current neo- liberal ort hodoxy. The political

prospects f or this in Croatia are not good: the new ruling coalition, led by a Social Democractic Party,appears intent on maintaining many aspects o f the clientelistic foundations of its right-wing predecessor,

hoping fo r a model of recovery which relies on a combination of (of ten state-driven) inf rast ructure projects

combined with an at tack on both organised labour and the poor and excluded. A progress ive Minister of the

Environment was dismissed f rom the Government early on, and has now lef t t he SDP in protest o ver its

environmental policies; and the Minister of Social Aff airs and Youth appears f ocused on roo ting out

supposed benef it f raud amongst recipients o f state social assistance, f orget ting that a much bigger

problem is the huge numbers of poor people who do not receive the benef it.

Renewables as a bright spot

Croatia enters the EU with the f if th highest level of poverty and social exclusion of the 28 member states:

a to tal of 1.38 million people or 32.7% of the Croatian population was at risk on at least one of the three

key indicators (relative poverty, severe material deprivation, low work intensity) in 2011 (the last year for

which statist ics are avilable). Only Bulgaria (49.1%), Latvia (40.4%), Romania (40.3%), and Lithuania (33.4%)

had higher rates. Croatias target is to reduce this by 100,000 by 2020, a target as lacking in ambition as it
http://www.greeneuropeanjournal.eu/the-prospects-for-a-green-economy-in-croatia/http://www.greeneuropeanjournal.eu/author/paul-stubbs/http://www.greeneuropeanjournal.eu/category/debate-blog/http://www.greeneuropeanjournal.eu/the-prospects-for-a-green-economy-in-croatia/


2/3

is lacking in substance. A similarly depressing f igure concerns t he employment rate, which stoo d at 57% in

2011 and which the Government expects to rise only to 59% by 2020, making it the least ambitious target

of all the Member States and condemning Croatia to f all f urther behind the EU average and much behind

the overal EU target of 75%. The crisis has hit employment hard in Croatia, particularly amongst young

people, with Eurstat f igures showing an unemployment rate f or the 15-24 age group at 51.6% in March

2013, doubling in less than f our years. In terms of the share of renewable energy in gross f inal energy

consumption, Croat ia is perf orming better than the EU average at 15.7% in 2011 compared to the EU-27 at

13.0%, and may even be on t rack to meet the 20% target by 2020. In 2010 its primary energy consumption

was 96.8% of its level in 2005, although this is more a result of the crisis than any ef f ective policies.

Croatia does not appear in EU data f or greenhouse gas emiss ions, although EEA f igures suggest that

Croatia managed to reduce emissions only by 0.9% between 1990 and 2008. The EEA also suggests that

climate change is particularly worrying in Croat ia since it will mainly af f ect agriculture, f isheries, hydropower

and tourism, sectors which employ about 600,000 people and const itute a quarter of the Croat ian

economy.

Building the case for a new model

There is an opportunity, however small, to seize on Croatias EU memberships as a moment to t ransf orm

the growth paradigm and to think about the development o f a more sustainable and inclusive eco-socialpolicy. It is too easy to f orget, in the midst o f a long depression, that the golden years of growth f rom

2000 to 2007 were largely jobless, unsustainable, import-seeking, and consumption maximising. The crisis

which f ollowed has had, and cont inues to have, a severe and st ructural impact on unemployment,

decimation o f industrial production and, by implication, f urther contributing to a view that the mos t desired

employer is the state o r the local municipal authorit ies. The challenge is t o build a political case f or green

obs, i.e. low-carbon, low-energy, low raw material jobs and jobs which protect and restore eco- systems

and bio diversity and/or minimise the production of waste and pollution. Croat ia could seize the opportunity

to reward early adopters o f green technology within a much more ambitious programme of support f or

Corporate Social Responsibility and so cial enterprises. Can the decimations of deindustrialisation be

turned into a comparative advantage in a region with perhaps both the most intact, and therefore mostvulnerable, eco- system in wider Europe? Why not become leaders in ecological fo od production, f orest

preservation, electricity production f rom wind and sunlight and, of course, sustainable tourism?

All of this is important , in and o f itself , but what is needed more than ever are new kinds of sustainable and

redist ributive eco-so cial policies which, in Ian Goughs words, can achieve ecologically beneficial and

socially just impacts promot ing new patt erns of production, consumption and investment, changing

producer and consumer behaviour while improving well-being, and ensuring a f airer distribut ion of power

and resources. Inequality in Croatia is more dramatic than tends to be shown by raw aggregate f igures

suggesting, f or example, that the Gini coef f icient of income inequality was 0.31 in 2011. More worrying are

regional inequalities and demographic changes which suggest that the younger, better educated, population

has tended to move away f rom rural areas and move to large cities. Whilst the likely impact o f brain drain

out of Croatia proper cannot be f orecast with certainty, its impact will probably be less than the decline of

rural, iso lated, and war aff ected areas. It is precisely in these areas that a new kind of regeneration, not

based on traditional models of competitiveness and ef f iciency, can be envisaged.

Nothing short o f an holistic re-linkage of the economic, the ecological and the social, much as is at tempted

in The Green New Deal, is needed. This has to combine sustainable production with new f orms of taxation

and revenue raising, to make poss ible real and meaningful redist ribution plus innovative responses to so-

called new risks which render nation-state t raditional welfare state solutions sub-optimal: such as climate

change, migration, the oppression of minorities, erosion of meaningful participation, the rise of gendered

transnat ional care chains, and so on. The 2008 Green Vision f or a Social Europe also , rightly, emphasisedthe importance of Services o f General Interest and the need to f ight against so -called trade creep where

the creation of f ree markets in services is f uelling the privatisat ion and commercialisat ion of essential

services, including health and education. Croat ia needs a political alliance, including reinvigorated social

movements , which can art iculate a set o f winnable demands around social and environmental just ice,
http://greennewdeal.eu/


3/3

the prospects for a green economy in croatia paul stubbs

Documents