Partnership for Action on Green Economy (PAGE) in Asia

Development partners: European Union; Germany, Federal Ministry for the Environment, Nature Conservation and Nuclear Safety; Finland, Ministry for Foreign Affairs; Norway, Ministry of Climate and Environment; Republic of Korea, Ministry of Environment; Swedish International Development Cooperation Agency (SIDA); Switzerland, State Secretariat for Economic Affairs; United Arab Emirates, Ministry of Climate Change and Environment.

PAGE brings together five UN agencies – UN Environment Programme (UNEP), International Labour Organization (ILO), UN Development Programme (UNDP), UN Industrial Development Organization (UNIDO), and UN Institute for Training and Research (UNITAR) – whose mandates, expertise and networks combined can offer integrated and holistic support to countries on inclusive green economy, ensuring coherence and avoiding duplication. ILO’s activities within PAGE focus on Green Jobs and ensuring Just Transitions that manage workplace changes as a result of the impacts of climate change.

In Asia, PAGE is currently being implemented in six countries:

• Cambodia (joining from 2022)
• China
• India
• Indonesia
• Mongolia
• Thailand

Background and update

Green jobs are jobs that are good for people, good for the economy, and good for the environment. They are both a mechanism to achieve sustainable development, as well as an outcome that can provide the double dividend of decent employment creation with reduced environmental impacts. Developing and implementing policies to promote green employment and Just Transition is the ambition of Governments around the world, including in Asia.

Developing a supportive policy ecosystem to enable green jobs growth and ensure a Just Transition is critical; yet in many policy areas and jurisdictions green jobs and just transition are new concepts which require awareness raising and capacity building in order to be better understood and promoted. Policy coherence and consistency also need to be strengthened as the transformation toward an environmentally sustainable economy involves multiple stakeholders with often different interests, priorities and mandates that need to be coordinated and harmonized through social dialogue.

ILO aims to enhance the understanding of the employment impacts of the green transition and address knowledge gaps of national economies to support sustainable development and promote Green Jobs and Just Transition in the country, while enhancing peer learning through regional exchanges.

Key activities

ILO’s support under PAGE in Asia focus on the following key activities:

• Policy readiness assessments for Green Jobs and Just Transition (a systematic assessment of policy system and ability to undertake transformational change);
• Green Jobs potential assessment (assessing current and potential opportunities for green jobs in selected sectors);
• Decent Work assessments (working with social partners to analyze decent work standards in selected context and identify how gaps and deficits can be addressed, e.g. through capacity building activities);
• Just Transition planning based on the ILO Just Transition Guidelines (a planning process with government, workers, enterprises and communities to identify and implement the context-specific policy mix for sustainable supply chains, enterprises and decent work in the transition to low carbon economy); and
• Case studies (selected examples of change and successful transitions with an analysis of context and drivers of change to inform future actions).

Methodologies used in each country project are targeted and tailored to the specific national and local contexts, e.g. in each country a different key sector is selected for analysis based on the relevant national policy, priorities and development situation.