Green Global Value Chains for Sustainable Development

This Element explores how GGVCs and GFDI can drive environmental upgrading, sustainable development, and decarbonisation.

Green Global Value Chains (GGVCs) and Green Foreign Direct Investment (GFDI) are central to decarbonisation and sustainable development. This Element develops a unified framework linking value chains, environmental upgrading, and development outcomes, presents new evidence on GFDI geography, and proposes a policy framework for leveraging GGVCs.In a world facing environmental transformation, mobilising the capital, skills, and knowledge required for decarbonisation and wider sustainability remains a formidable challenge. We argue that Green Global Value Chains (GGVCs)-and the Green Foreign Direct Investment (GFDI) that helps to build and reconfigure them-are central to this shift and can support sustainable development across a fragmented spatial economy. We advance the concept of environmental upgrading, showing how participation in GGVCs can move firms, regions, and countries towards cleaner production and higher-value activities while reshaping natural capital. This work has three aims. First, it offers a unified conceptual perspective on how GVCs shape environmental and development outcomes, introducing the Green Smile Curve and a typology of green, brown, and ordinary value chains. Second, it provides new empirical evidence on the geography of GFDI. Third, it proposes a GGVCs-sensitive policy framework-centred on building, embedding, and reshaping value chains-to help governments leverage GGVCs. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.