Green Economy and Employment: employment potential of the ecological transition in Spain

The Green Economy offers real possibilities for productive innovation, economic growth and employment creation in Spain. These three factors are critical to facilitate the necessary change in the productive model to overcome the crisis. However, the measures taken by the current Conservative government have moved in the opposite direction: significant cutting in incentives for renewable, increasing tax burden on renewable energy production to self-consumption and privatizing public spaces of social and environmental interest. This hinders the achievement of the environmental objectives of the Europe 2020 strategy. A strategy that is born already in itself highly limited, unambitious and subordinated to the interests of energy oligopolies and the imperatives of the Stability and Growth Pact (Maastricht) and the Austerity policies imposed from EU institutions to overcome the 2008 financial crisis. So the Ecological Transition goes further, claiming a substantially change in Economic Policy away form the increasing commodification proposed by the Green Economy. Despite these limitations, young and unemployed people have much to gain from a comprehensive development of environmental industries. Therefore, innovative-sustainable plans, investment and training in green sectors are necessary to make easier the transition from a services low-valued economy to an innovative and sustainable model to make our country an environmental reference in Europe.

Understandings of transnational families in debates on Migration and development

International migration sets in motion a range of significant transnational processes that connect countries and people. How migration interacts with development and how policies might promote and enhance such interactions have, since the turn of the millennium, gained attention on the international agenda. The recognition that transnational practices connect migrants and their families across sending and receiving societies forms part of this debate. The ways in which policy debate employs and understands transnational family ties nevertheless remain underexplored. This article sets out to discern the understandings of the family in two (often intermingled) debates concerned with transnational interactions: The largely state and policydriven discourse on the potential benefits of migration on economic development, and the largely academic transnational family literature focusing on issues of care and the micro-politics of gender and generation. Emphasizing the relation between diverse migration-development dynamics and specific family positions, we ask whether an analytical point of departure in respective transnational motherhood, fatherhood or childhood is linked to emphasizing certain outcomes. We conclude by sketching important strands of inclusions and exclusions of family matters in policy discourse and suggest ways to better integrate a transnational family perspective in global migration-development policy.