A new guide produced by UN Environment’s Partnership for Action on Green Economy (PAGE) and partners provides practical advice on the transition to a Green Economy for the industrial sector.

The publication, titled ‘A practitioner’s guide to strategic green industrial policy,’ describes tools that can be applied to what some industrial policymakers may consider to be relatively under-explored territory.

Some of the changes required for a transition to a green economy imply significant restructuring, if not disruption of technological paths. However, the guide aims to ease this transition by providing detailed guidance, highlighting a number of changes that are relatively easy to implement.

The report draws on tools and methodologies from disciplines such as industrial ecology and ecological economics, with other tools rooted in systems thinking, theory of change, or other fields of research and practice. It was produced in order to provide practical advice on the evolving concept of Strategic Green Industrial Policy (SGIP) for policy practitioners.

In order to transform a country's industrial sector, markets and consumer behaviour must see resource-intensive production and consumption patterns replaced with more resource efficient ones. Greening will require multiple interventions to be developed and agreed on by affected stakeholders.

The guide therefore aims to provide decision makers with the necessary tools and information to steer through this very necessary transition, and develop a SGIP that reflects their country's own unique ecological, economic and social context as well as aspirations

In addition to the guide, a supplement has been developed to provide more detail on several tools and categories of assessment that are useful for developing SGIP.

In order to read the guide please click here and for the supplement click here. For more information contact chiara.moroni@unep.org