Conference Agenda

Preferential trade agreements (PTAs) increasingly include public participation provisions in their environmental chapters. While these provisions are typically vague and poorly enforceable, one procedure is more elaborate: the submission on enforcement matters (SEM) process. The latter was originally created by the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) and later diffused to other US PTAs concluded with Latin American partners. SEMs are written documents filed by civil society members asserting that one of the PTA’s parties is failing to enforce its environmental laws. They are compiled and assessed by a secretariat and can lead to the production of a factual record if the secretariat considers it warranted. Factual records consist of an investigative report including interviews with government officials and analysis from independent experts.

As the final step of the SEM process, the production of a factual record can be analytically investigated as the “success” of a submission. In this sense, the vast majority of SEMs are not successful. This paper investigates why this is the case and what conditions make SEMs more likely to succeed. It relies on a new dataset compiling the 158 SEMs submitted between 1995 and 2022 under the framework of PTAs concluded by the United States. Using qualitative comparative analysis, I test the effect of three conditions for success: the government concerned with the SEM; the type of submitter (an NGO, a citizen, or a coalition); and the nature of the environmental issue (related to human health or not).

Factual records are not binding on the parties and the SEM process is not exempt from limitations. Nevertheless, the process is not costless either, as it requires in-depth investigation from the secretariat and responses from the parties. Further, the SEM process is one of the most advanced civil society participation mechanisms in environmental governance, including in environmental treaties. 54 SEMs have been submitted in the last 10 years, suggesting that environmental NGOs and citizens still find a use to the procedure three decades after the conclusion of NAFTA. Therefore, finding the conditions under which SEMs are most likely to result in a factual record provides lessons on how to improve civil society participation in environmental governance. This is critical to ensure that state environmental commitments are implemented, which could partly appease the backlash PTAs have been facing in recent years. In sum, this paper contributes to the literatures on participatory environmental governance, government accountability, and trade-environment politics.

Climate change is undoubtedly one of the most crucial challenges for the survival of humankind. In response to the increase in climate effects, many countries have designed a myriad of policies to achieve net zero emissions. Several policies that nominally have climate change mitigating objectives also have substantial trade impacts, be they implicit or explicit. These trade-related climate policies are proliferating and their impacts on global trade are growing rapidly. For example, promoting environmentally sound products and standards can impact the production and commercialisation of goods in several sectors of the global economy, including agriculture, mining, and manufacturing. In addition, emerging economic strategies concerned with rising international competition, national security issues, and green industrial development are becoming more integrated into climate policies. Despite the growing relevance of climate policies for international trade, the global landscape of trade-related climate policies has not been systematically studied and compiled into a single database. Although existing databases provide information on climate or trade policies, they do not capture the elements that make climate policies crucial trade instruments. To address this gap, we introduce the Trade-Related Climate Policy (TRCP) Database. The TRCP database includes policies from all G20 countries since 1990, compiling information on policies’ regulatory elements and trade impact. Our database provides evidence for researchers and policymakers to understand the implications of climate policy for trade and promote policies in the least trade-restrictive way possible.

Recent academic and policy discussions on the Circular Economy (CE) gained traction in sustainability and social sciences literature not only in the context of highly industrialised countries but also in the Global South. They attempt to bring an alternative model to replace the current linear production-consumption model through more extended material use and staying within planetary boundaries.

Natural sciences and engineering scholars have mainly articulated the concept of CE. By contrast, social science has criticised techno-optimistic conceptualisations and the lack of empirical and contextual knowledge from the Global South. Critical scholars called attention to the circular economy’s privileging of neo-colonial and neo-liberal approaches to development. The focus on Global North demonstrates an emphasis on well-being, decoupling benefits, and high-technology solutions and predominantly focus on circulating high-value materials in the Global North. By contrast, the focus on Global South by scholars and practitioners in the Global North points to promoting ‘green growth’ through waste management jobs, focusing on certain types of material circulation practices, such as installing recycling plants for hazardous and low-value materials and neglecting the social implications for the informal sector in the Global South.

Such divergence in conceptualisations and academic discourses on the Circular Economy concept and especially on its social and justice implications instrumentalises the Circular Economy as an International Development tool in the context of the Global South. It frames it as a sustainability model with the benefits of addressing climate change and transforming lifestyles and social-economic-environmental relations in the Global North. However, these divergent conceptualizations potentially re-produce and replicate pre-existing inequalities in development and create silos on equity and justice considerations of the Circular Economy concept.

This paper conducts a critical narrative review of selected academic and policy literature published from 2010 through 2022. It investigates fundamental conceptualisations and discourses around the Circular Economy while attempting to find out how and to what extent such conceptualizations differ in the context of the Global North and Global South. The paper contributes to the developing critical scholarship on the Circular Economy from the angle of socio-ecological impact.

The environmental impact of trade agreements has been a controversial political issue since the early 1990s. Trade participants were prompted at an early stage to conduct environmental impact assessments (EIAs) of trade agreements. For example, in 1993 the OECD Council of Ministers recommended that “governments should examine or review trade and environmental policies and agreements that have potentially significant implications for other policy areas”. In 2017, UNEP and IISD developed recommendations for conducting environmental impact assessments of trade agreements in terms of timing, geographic and topical scope, and types of assessors. Surprisingly, there is no systematic assessment of how trade participants implement EIAs for trade agreements and the extent to which current practices for EIAs for trade agreements comply with these recommendations. Our study examines the design of environmental impact assessments of trade agreements. Who performs environmental impact assessments and how are they implemented for which trade agreements? To what extent do trade participants include environmental risks in trade agreements? By collecting and reviewing environmental impact assessments of more than 100 trade agreements notified to the WTO since 1995, we categorize this information according to the four criteria recommended by UNEP IISD, which provide a baseline for assessing the quality and effectiveness of EIAs.

We illustrate the significance of this new dataset by analyzing the EU's regulatory approach to the environmental impact assessment of trade agreements from a comparative perspective with other trade actors performing similar trade transaction assessments (i.e., the United States, Canada, China, the United Kingdom, New Zealand, South Korea, and Japan). Our preliminary results indicate that the EU is leading the international field, with 35 (85%) EIAs in 41 EU trade agreements, engaging independent consultants for EIAs of trade agreements, and conducting EIAs for both parties involved. However, current environmental impact assessments of trade agreements fall far short of UNEP recommendations, especially in terms of impact on third parties, ex-post analysis assessments, and standard indicators of environmental impact. The dataset we created in the design of trade agreement EIAs provides longitudinal and comparative insights into how and to what extent environmental risks are incorporated into unilateral, bilateral, and regional trade policies. We focus here on the European Union, but the dataset will also contribute to broader academic and policy debates on the institutional design of trade agreements, coordination of trade and environmental policies, environmental impact assessment, and risk regulation.