NINA NETZER| A GLOBAL GREEN NEW DEAL 1. Introduction Ongoing climate change and coping with the effects of the international financial and economic crisis are among the most pressing global challenges at present. For many countries this raises the question as to how the objectives of climate protection and economic growth, which for a long time were considered to be diametri­cally opposed to one another, can be promoted at the same time. Moreover, a large number of states face the challenging task of meeting their growing energy needs, creating jobs and not least overcoming the social and economic consequences of climate change, which have already become manifest. The double crisis of economy and ecology over the last few years has shown that the »old school« way of doing business, i. e. based on finite fossil fuels and the exploitation of natural resources, is no longer possible. Industrialised, newly emerging and developing countries therefore face the common chal­lenge of restructuring their current economic model in an ecological sustainable way or respectively building an economic model based on renewable energies. This shift can also mean an opportunity in terms of a»green recovery« allowing for climate protection and economic growth at the same time. The term Global Green New Deal has been making the rounds in political debates for some years now. Estab­lished by the United Nations Environmental Programme (UNEP) in 2008, the term stands for the idea of crea ­ting jobs with public funding to promote sustainable development – as happened through a host of more or less green national economic-stimulus packages aimed at mitigating the consequences of the global financial and economic crisis while at the same time setting the course for a new sustainable economic model. A global deal means that the shift towards an environmentally sustainable future should take all regions of the world into account. By pooling and bundling targeted policies, problems common to all regions of the world shall be tackled in an integrated manner. These include combat­ing ongoing climate change and its effects, satisfying rising energy demands everywhere in the world and sta­bilising the international financial and economic system. In the narrower sense of the UNEP term, the Green New Deal relates to the numerous economic stimulus pa­ckages which were instituted by many national govern­ments, in which considerable sums of financial resources were earmarked for green, sustainable investments, e.g. in low-emissions technologies, energy-efficient refur ­bishment of buildings or sustainable transport infrastruc­tures. There are various barriers preventing sustainable structural change in actual practice, however: aside from the fact that the effectiveness of these measures must be seriously doubted in some cases such as, for exam­ple, in South Korea, where investment in the expansion of nuclear energy is a key element in the green growth strategy, diametrically opposed incentive structures exist in many countries such as, for instance, subsidies for the manufacturing and use of fossil energies. And not least, only a very small percentage of the money pledged by governments has been made available so far. Given all this, the proposal by the UNEP for a global economic­stimulus package in which for example the G20 states would have to invest 1 % of their total GDP in a green economy appears difficult to attain. Not least for this reason, a long-term shift towards a new ecological focus for the economy is necessary above and beyond these temporary measures. Hence in the broader sense the Global Green New Deal must be understood as a so­cietal shift in paradigm towards a new, sustainable de­velopment model in which production systems and na­tional economies as well as consumption structures and forms of human coexistence are reorganised globally in a low-emission, resource-saving and sustainable manner. Even though a Green New Deal offers a good opportu­nity to reverse the negative correlation between environ­mental and economic policy, some issues nevertheless remain unresolved: at the national level, these primarily relate to how individual packages of measures can be embedded in a more long-term structure in order to fos­ter a societal and economic shift in paradigm. At the in­ternational level, the question especially arises as to what requirements a Global Green New Deal must meet and whether this amounts to more than the sum of various national activities. This paper addresses these questions and traces out the next steps which need to be taken in order to initiate a Green New Deal at the global level. 2. National initiatives – jointly achieving a global deal? Although a Global Green New Deal has an internatio­nal thrust by nature, it nevertheless requires activities at the local, national, regional and global level. While 2