Why Look at Tasks When Designing Skills Policy for the Green Transition? A Methodological Note on How to Identify Green Occupations and the Skills They Require

The coexistence of several definitions of green jobs and measurement instruments gives room for mismatches between those concepts and their application to research questions. This paper first presents an organizing framework for the existing definitions, measurement instruments, and policy frameworks. It then delves into discussing two appropriate approaches for identifying green occupations to guide skills development policy: the task-content and the skills approaches. In the process, it introduces a novel methodology with a dictionary of green terms for identifying green tasks and occupations. This methodology, utilizing text analysis, demonstrates superior performance compared to the well-known O*NET Green Economic Project classification, particularly for developing countries. Lastly, the paper applies this methodology to Indonesia, a middle-income country, and utilizes various data sources to showcase the utility of the dictionary and text analysis exercise.