“Green skills" and the emergent property of “greening”

This article offers critical analysis of the concept of “green skills" as part of policies designed to support green transition. We argue that it is unhelpful to focus on (definitions and narrow sets of) “green skills", as opposed to conceptualising the emergent properties of social systems which result in “greening” i.e. the incorporation of policies and practices in various societal domains, which comprise measurable reduced environmental impact and environmentally responsible economic activity as an outcome. We maintain: (a) greening can be considered an emergent property at the macro level (e.g. green economy, green industry) to which skills of various types contribute, in combination with other arrangements at the organisational, institutional and policy level; (b) what counts more in reaching green goals is not delivering parcels of so-called “green skills”, but education and training of a form that is the emergent property of how a certain type of Vocational Education and Training (VET) system functions, and of the pedagogical assumptions underpinning it. Our discussion is prompted by two projects on the European steel industry’s efforts to decarbonise and comparative reflections on the capacity of VET in Germany and the UK to deliver the skills necessary to support (the steel industry’s) transition.