Toward a New Understanding of Development in Face of Global Warming

The terms ‘development’, ‘developing countries’, and ‘developed countries’ are often used, but not well defined. The most important definitions are arbitrary. The paper intends to review some variants of the terms, attached to underlying theories and concepts of development. After many decades of development, it is clear that most theories did not properly foresee the factual development that has taken place. Although the problem of scarcity of exhaustible natural resources is known since long, the challenge of the climate crisis has not been sufficiently integrated in the understanding of development. Given that today two thirds of global emissions originate from the ‘Global South’, battling global heating depends on taking responsibility of all countries in the North and in the South. De-development is a great risk for many developing and emerging economies and the entire planet. The paper sketches a proposal for a new understanding of development, based on the green growth concept.