Governance through Economic Paradigms: Addressing Climate Change by Accounting for Health

Kristine Belesova, Ilan Kelman and Roger Boyd
Additional contact information
Kristine Belesova: Social and Environmental Health Research Department, London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, UK
Ilan Kelman: Institute for Risk & Disaster Reduction, University College London, UK, Institute for Global Health, University College London, UK, and University of Agder, Norway
Roger Boyd: Independent Researcher, Canada

Politics and Governance, 2016, vol. 4, issue 4, 87-96

Abstract: Climate change is a major challenge for sustainable development, impacting human health, wellbeing, security, and livelihoods. While the post-2015 development agenda sets out action on climate change as one of the Sustainable Development Goals, there is little provision on how this can be achieved in tandem with the desired economic progress and the required improvements in health and wellbeing. This paper examines synergies and tensions between the goals addressing climate change and economic progress. We identify reductionist approaches in economics, such as ‘externalities’, reliance on the metric of the Gross Domestic Product, positive discount rates, and short-term profit targets as some of the key sources of tensions between these goals. Such reductionist approaches could be addressed by intersectoral governance mechanisms. Health in All Policies, health-sensitive macro-economic progress indicators, and accounting for long-term and non-monetary values are some of the approaches that could be adapted and used in governance for the SDGs. Policy framing of climate change and similar issues should facilitate development of intersectoral governance approaches.

Keywords: climate change; disaster risk reduction; economic growth; health; health in all policies; sustainable development; sustainable development goals (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2016
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.cogitatiopress.com/politicsandgovernance/article/view/729 (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:cog:poango:v4:y:2016:i:4:p:87-96

DOI: 10.17645/pag.v4i4.729

Access Statistics for this article

Politics and Governance is currently edited by Carolina Correia

More articles in Politics and Governance from Cogitatio Press
Bibliographic data for series maintained by António Vieira () and IT Department ().