Assessing Green Jobs Potential in Developing Countries: A Practitioner’s Guide

The knowledge of how the transition to a sustainable, low-carbon economy will affect employment, especially underlying job movements, is vital to informing policy, yet there are few comparable studies for developing countries. As part of the ILO’s Global Green Jobs Programme, this guide provides practical solutions to help fill these information gaps.

A number of studies for industrialized countries assess how a transition to a sustainable, low-carbon economy might affect employment. These typically find overall job gains compared to “business-as-usual” scenarios. The more detailed of these studies address not just changes in the total number of jobs, but also underlying job movements as well as the quality of jobs. Such knowledge is vital to informing policies that enable a just transition to a green economy, yet there are few comparable studies for developing countries. A key bottleneck is the scarcity of information, particularly employment and production data on green jobs as well as on linkages with the rest of the economy. As part of the ILO’s Global Green Jobs Programme, this guide provides practical solutions tailored to the considerations of developing countries that can help fill these information gaps. The guide adopts a menu approach, providing policy-makers with a range of options that take into account time and resource constraints as well as policy priorities. Though meant to stand on its own, the guide also serves as a companion to a series of country studies published separately by the ILO, which provide country-specific details on how the guide can be applied.

The guide was developed by GHK Consultants and the ILO headquarters and regional office in Bangkok in the context of the national green jobs mapping study carried out in Bangladesh in 2010.