sustainability

Editorial
Grow First, Clean Up Later? Dropping Old Paradigms and
Opening Up New Horizons of Sustainable Development
Elkhan Richard Sadik-Zada 1,3, * and Andrea Gatto 2,3,4, *

1 Institute of Development Research and Development Policy, Ruhr-University Bochum,

44801 Bochum, Germany
2 Faculty of Economics, Wenzhou-Kean University, Wenzhou 325015, China
3 Center for Studies on Europe, Azerbaijan State University of Economics, Baku AZ1001, Azerbaijan
4 Center for Economic Development and Social Change (CED), 80128 Naples, Italy
* Correspondence: [email protected] (E.R.S.-Z.); [email protected] (A.G.)

Abstract: After almost two decades of continuous development in bio, circular, and green economy,
it is time to assess the major achievements and challenges that private and public enterprises face
today for further enhancing global sustainability concepts. To this end, the present thematic issue
accommodates twenty articles on different topics related to circular economy development and
green growth, proposing a contribution to the field of environmental economics and policy. The
central feature of this Special Issue is the focus on the best practices and challenges in terms of
green growth and eco-innovation in developing and transitioning structurally challenged areas.
Hence, the study elaborates on the pathways of bio, circular, and green growth and eco-innovation in
the context of countries with relatively low per capita income. By doing this, the collection shows
that the empirically established environmental Kuznets curve—i.e., the inverted U-shaped income-
environment nexus—can and must be critically questioned, at least in the contexts mentioned within
the framework of our Special Issue. Hence, the geographic frontiers of environmental upgrading,
carbon-saving bioeconomic development, and green growth are not limited to the economically
advanced areas.

Keywords: circular economy; bioeconomy; green growth; eco-innovation; developing countries;

environmental Kuznets curve; EKC; environmental economics and policy; ecological economics;
resource management; energy policy; sustainable development

Citation: Sadik-Zada, E.R.; Gatto, A.

Grow First, Clean Up Later? Dropping
Old Paradigms and Opening Up
1. Introduction: Grow & Perish?
New Horizons of Sustainable
Development. Sustainability 2023, 15,
Five decades have passed since the publications of the Limits to Growth of the Club of
3595. https://doi.org/10.3390/
Rome and the “Only the Earth” in Stockholm—the first UN Conference on the limitations
su15043595 in the absorptive capacity of the global environment [1]. Both events marked the start of
the discussion of global environmentalism and putting the environment on the political
Received: 2 February 2023
agenda of the dialogue between industrialized and developing countries [2].
Accepted: 6 February 2023
The 1972 UN Conference on the Environment in Stockholm was the first truly global
Published: 15 February 2023
conference on the environment that, for the first time in history, elevated environmental
protection to the top of the global political agenda. Twenty years later, the Earth Summit
in Rio de Janeiro in 1992 was an important caesura in understanding the importance of
Copyright: © 2023 by the authors.
developing countries in protecting the global environment. The Paris Agreement of 2015
Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. was probably the greatest milestone and the first truly global treaty on climate action.
This article is an open access article Despite generous nationally-determined pledges within the agreement, there have been
distributed under the terms and plenty of drawbacks [3]. The undertaken climate action is nowhere near enough to achieve
conditions of the Creative Commons the set climate targets [4].
Attribution (CC BY) license (https:// Despite increasing environmental awareness in developing, transitioning, and emerg-
creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ ing economies and impressive nationally determined pledges within the Paris Agreement,
4.0/). economic growth, job creation, and poverty alleviation have been the central focus of the

Sustainability 2023, 15, 3595. https://doi.org/10.3390/su15043595 https://www.mdpi.com/journal/sustainability

Sustainability 2023, 15, 3595 2 of 6

public policies in these countries [5]. The Global North has not been taking sufficient
responsibility for the development of carbon-saving technology solutions in the Global
South. This explains why fifty years after the publication of The Limits to Growth we do
not only have an empirical validation of its pessimism regarding the doubling of global
resource use, but also the evidence that the business-as-usual rushes human civilization to
its own destruction. Fifty years later, mankind is on the brink of the socioeconomic abyss
and climate catastrophe [4]. Hence, mankind can no longer afford the “grow first, clean up
later” model, which continues to dominate the growth and development patterns in the
developing, transitioning, and structurally challenged areas worldwide [6].
The inverted U-shaped relationship between per capita income (PCI) and per capita
greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, i.e., the environmental Kuznets curve (EKC) hypothesis
is probably empirically the most established regularity within the framework of environ-
mental macroeconomics. It has been validated for advanced, developing, and transitional
economies [7,8]. The EKC is nothing but a regularity of growing first and cleaning up later
and it is at odds with the ongoing climate crisis and the related climate targets within the
framework of the Paris Agreement [9].
The augmentation of the income-environment perspective by the pollution haven
hypothesis, which has been also empirically validated in a number of recent studies,
shows that even the progress in terms of environmental upgrading in OECD countries are
attributed to the relocation of the dirty industries to the countries of the Global South [9].
Hence, following the empirically validated patterns of environmental development is not
congruent with the energy and climate futures we want [9–12].
Does this mean that there are no alternatives to the environmental Kuznets curve and
the pollution haven hypotheses? Is humanity predestined to lose the climate emergency
race? How are grave disruptions such as COVID-19, geopolitical turmoil, and major shocks
affecting our societies, economies, and ecosystems? Shall we accept a grow-and-perish
paradigm, opting for a trade-off between environmental, social, and economic targets [13–37]?

2. Content of the Thematic Issue

The thematic issue accommodates three reviews and sixteen research papers. Breaugh
et al. [37], provide a systematic literature review on innovation scaling and the role of
innovation in overcoming global issues such as climate change, sustainable management
of natural resources, and economic inequality. They outline the ontological differences
between the “diffusion” and “scaling” of innovations and establish a research agenda for
the assessment of innovation scaling and by doing so, frame the present thematic issue
conceptually [37,38]. The rest of the works, including the two review papers, Solaymani [39]
and Abbas et al. [32], address the individual country cases of developing or structurally
challenged areas of Southern Europe [39].
Abbas et al. [32] analyze the effect of COVID-19 on the Pakistani economy and find
that the pandemic severely hit different sectors of the economy and large swaths of the pop-
ulation. However, the poorest in society, especially the daily-wage earners and the runners
of small businesses, were disproportionately hit in Pakistan. Wang and Chen [14] address
an interesting question of the efficiency and effectiveness of the consumption coupons in
China that were introduced in the face of the COVID-19 pandemic. They propose an im-
proved minimum-cost maximum flow approach that could optimize consumption coupon
policies both in the Chinese and non-Chinese contexts.
Fernández Luiña et al. [15] elaborate on the issue of the community commitment
to sustainability using the case study of forest protection policies in Guatemala. Here,
the authors illustrate how Guatemala implements forest preservation policies through
community concessions. The research paper contributes to the theoretical literature by
extending the scope of the analysis to modern municipals’ forest preservation practices.
Based on the empirical findings, the authors recommend the government of Guatemala the
employment of decentralized forest policies at the national level.
Sustainability 2023, 15, 3595 3 of 6

Bin-Nashwan et al. [16] conduct a cross-country analysis of the donor responses to

the fundraising appeals for combating the epidemic. The study is based on a quantitative
analysis of 801 donors from Kuwait and Bahrain. The authors find that both in Kuwait and
Bahrain, humanitarian projects, internet technology, social networking sites, and religiosity
are significant determinants of donor attitudes toward online donations.
Mammadli [17] and Zeynalova and Namazova [18] analyze the environmentally
relevant behavior of enterprises and end-consumers in the context of transition economies.
Both research articles focus on the case studies of Azerbaijan. In the former publication, the
environmentally responsible approaches of Azerbaijani companies correspond with the size
of the private firms in terms of sales and the number of their employees [17]. In the latter
of these studies, the willingness to pay for green technology-based products is predicated
on the statistical analysis of 536 structured interviews in the greater area of Baku [18]. In
contrast to [17] which analyzes enterprises and [18] which analyzes consumer behavior,
Montakhabi et al. [19] explore the behavior of the prosumers and their barriers to the
enhancement of sustainable business models in electricity markets. The work contributes to
the theory of the firm by applying the resource-based approach in an entirely novel context
of energy economics [20–22].
Leal Filho et al. [23] analyze the role of renewable energy for fostering energy security
of small island developing states. Their study is based on a comprehensive quantitative
literature review and policy analysis that has been conducted by means of VOSviewer, a
prominent software for bibliometric analyses. The authors also find that renewable energy
contributes in a decisive way to the food security of the small island developing states.
Kennedyd et al. [24] address the question of economic sustainability in China. The
inquiry explores the underlying factors that influence Chinese online consumers’ acceptance
of online shopping platforms. The authors of the study assess 691 interviews of Chinese
online shoppers. Embedding the data into the theoretical model yields interesting results
with regard to the choice patterns of the e-commerce platforms and consumer attitudes.
Marjerison et al. [25] analyze the creation of sustainable organizations through knowl-
edge sharing and organizational agility in China. The study analyzes 720 online ques-
tionnaires and finds that working groups that are more agile have a greater capacity of
harnessing the knowledge-sharing culture. The validity of these findings spans various
classes of businesses. Li et al. [26] complement the investigation of Marjerison et al. [25] in
a meaningful way. They propose a novel multi-factor three-step feature selection and deep
learning framework for regional GDP prediction in the Chinese provinces [26].
Chen [27] compares two panel data sets of developing and advanced economies for a
time frame spanning between 1990 and 2021 and shows that economic competitiveness
and increased commodity prices lead to the increasing adoption of green technologies and
decarbonization of the entire economy. The study of Xu et al. [28] address a similar issue
by investigating the changes in firm innovation in the aftermath of the Sino-U.S. trade
grievance. Their analysis is based on the unique microdata of the Chinese technology
firms. The authors find that Sino-U.S. trade friction has led to a significant increase of the
innovations of Chinese exporters.
Zhao and Chen [29] also address the case of China and examine the effect of family
lifestyle and neighborhood on the willingness of households to sort their waste. The
authors inspect China Labor Force Dynamics Survey for 2016 and show that lifestyle
and neighborhood have a significant impact on households’ waste management patterns.
Abdelsalam et al. [30] also address the problem of waste management, but in a totally
different setting, focusing on the Libyan public hospitals. This publication finds that
organizational culture and structure play a decisive role in the waste management practices
of the Libyan hospitals.
Based on structured interviews of 359 consumers, Civero et al. [40] scrutinize con-
sumer behavior in the city of Naples in Southern Italy. The authors show that also in the
structurally challenged areas, the consumers’ purchasing choices of food staples are not
based only on purely economic but also on ethical and environmental factors. The authors
Sustainability 2023, 15, 3595 4 of 6

employ a factor analysis that enables the classification of the consumers in five homogenous
clusters. Selected pathways of using the emerging trend of new social consumption are
predicated for the formulation of better public policies to foster ecological sustainability.
Sadik-Zada [37] analyze the perspectives of green hydrogen rollout from the lens of
both international and development economics. The author shows that the development
of the green hydrogen value chain and the substitution of fossil fuels by green hydrogen
could lead to clean and circular energy systems in a number of countries of the Global
North. In addition, the review of the national and European hydrogen strategies indicates
that fostering of international development cooperation, especially international energy
cooperation of the EU with the solar energy-abundant countries of Africa could accelerate
the green hydrogen take-off in Europe. Furthermore, the study also shows that investing in
the development of green hydrogen production in Africa could also substantially contribute
to socio-economic development and energy transition in Sub-Saharan Africa.
Solaymani [38] analyzes the environmental and energy sustainability problems of
fossil fuels that rich countries are using through the case study of Iran. The research paper is
of particular interest because of the growing significance of petroleum-exporting countries
in the global carbon footprint [7]. There is also empirical evidence that oil-rich developing
and transition economies do not follow the inverted U-shaped, but rather a monotonically
increasing average income-environment relationship [8]. The author employs advanced co-
integration techniques to the data from Iran and detects a unidirectional causality between
non-renewable energy production and the growth of the renewables in the energy mix.
This implies that Iranian growth, which almost entirely relies on petroleum exports, has
substantially contributed to decarbonization of Iranian electricity mix.

3. Concluding Remarks: Striving to Be More Sustainable

Together with the editorial, the present Special Issue accommodated twenty contri-
butions, whereby three of them are literature reviews and sixteen of them are research
papers. Both review and research papers focus on the analysis of developing, transition,
emerging economies, and structurally challenged areas of Southern Europe. “Frontiers and
Best Practices in Bio, Circular, and Green Growth” make clear that geographic frontiers of
environmental upgrading, carbon-saving bioeconomy development, and green growth are
not confined to economically advanced areas and shall be tackled as global ecological and
sustainable development priorities.
The presented positive examples from this group of countries in this thematic issue
do not contest the empirical validity of the environmental Kuznets curve and pollution
haven hypotheses. By showing positive examples, it rather shows that based on novel
management approaches, the mentioned empirical regularities could be successfully obvi-
ated. Economic growth of developing, transition, and emerging economies can be aligned
with environmental sustainability. This confirms that, even in developing, transitioning,
and emerging economies, positive experiences denote a global strive towards sustainabil-
ity. These shreds of evidence also suggest that the economic, environmental, and social
components of development shall not be liable to trade-offs and a holistic and pluralistic
sustainable development purview needs to be enforced globally.

Institutional Review Board Statement: Not applicable.

Informed Consent Statement: Not applicable.
Conflicts of Interest: The authors declare no conflict of interest.

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