Our planet is facing significant challenges, inter alia climate change, environmental decline, and social injustice. The United Nations (UN) have defined “Sustainable Development Goals” (SDG) to address most of these challenges. The EU has contributed shaping the SDGs and is committed to implement them into EU policies. This includes EU trade policy through recent Free Trade Agreements (FTAs), mainly but not exclusively through their sustainability chapters. Thus, the EU has the ambition to be a global actor in implementing the SDGs through its FTAs. The arsenal of instruments to implement the SDGs is limited. Internally, one of these instruments is public procurement law and policy. Sustainability considerations have been inserted into the detailed set of EU Directives and policies governing procurement procedures in the 27 Member States, especially into the rules on specifying the good or service to be procured and the evaluation criteria for tenders. Recent FTAs of the EU also have procurement chapters. This contribution investigates these FTA public procurement chapters with regards to the extent they are promoting sustainability. After defining sustainability and explaining briefly how the EU implements sustainability in public procurement law and policy internally, the analysis will identify the relevant provisions in recent FTAs and draft FTAs with a special emphasis on CETA. The discussion of CETA will briefly include its transposition in Canada to determine whether there has been a normative impact. The analysis aims to increase our understanding of the emerging role of the EU as a global actor by using its FTAs beyond their sustainability chapters as instruments to further the SDGs. While recent developments show some promise, the discussion will show that this role is currently still limited.

The European Green Deal is closely interlinked to EU trade policy. Not only is the import of certain goods such as critical raw materials necessary to accomplish the green transformation of EU production systems, but environmental leakage through the relocation of companies and the environmental impacts of EU consumption outside of the EU also represent two major risks for the environmental success of the Green Deal. The interrelations between the EU Green Deal and the 2021 EU trade strategy have been discussed with a focus on the new unilateral trade measure such as the Carbon Border Adjustment mechanism.

This study assesses the coherence between recent bilateral trade agreements and the European Green Deal. How coherent is the EU bilateral trade policy with the objectives of the European Green Deal? Our conceptual framework builds on the notions of coherence of policy sphere, consistency in law and policy coherence for sustainable development. Specifically, we analyze policy coherence on three distinct levels: problem definition, policy objectives, and policy instruments. To analyze this, we focus on the evolution of EU trade strategies, environmental impact assessments and specific chapters in EU trade agreements with New Zealand, and Chile, such as Sustainable Food Systems, as well as specific environmental goods and environmental harmful goods.

Our analysis indicates that environmental objectives are increasingly integrated in EU trade strategies and EU trade instruments, but that coherence remains mostly weak and incoherencies persist. The goals the EU sets for itself in trade strategies and bilateral trade agreements do not replicate the ambition of the EGD. Policy instruments as environmental impact assessments are more and more frequently conducted before, during, and after negotiations, but it remains unclear how their insights are used. Design elements such as chapters on Trade and Sustainable Development or Sustainable Food Systems require mainly adaptation of partner countries. EU trade agreement furthermore do not seem to fully realize the potential of environmental goods, and do not address the sensitive topic of environmental impactful goods.

The study contributes to the longstanding debate about the relation of trade politics and the objective of protecting environmental sustainability, and provides comparative insights into the realm of international environment-trade-nexus. Identified areas of coherence and incoherence inform further research on how to better align EU bilateral trade policy with the European Green Deal.

2.12.0.0

2.12.0.0

The paper examines a paradigm shift that is taking place in the EU's Industrial Policy. The context is set by the discussion on the new ways of economic cooperation and the need of the new Washington consensus. We argue that the concepts of «partial de-globalization» and «open strategic autonomy» are becoming key for the EU. The paper focuses on the new EU Industrial Policy, which is shaped by the European Green Deal, on the one hand, and EU’s overall actorness and security concerns, on the other hand. This leads to the security - sustainability dilemma that plays out differently, depending on the counterpart in question. Combining methodological insights from the discourse analysis and case study, we examine the EU external industrial policy towards the U.S., Russia and Turkey, and identify how the EU’s industrial policy is shaped in each of these cases.