Since 2009, the European Union has systematically incorporated Trade and Sustainable Development (TSD) chapters into its Free Trade Agreements (FTAs), promoting a trade policy grounded in core labour rights and environmental protection. These chapters have become emblematic of the EU’s ambition to pursue a value-based trade policy. However, despite the formal symmetry between labour and environmental commitments within TSD chapters, their enforcement reveals an emerging asymmetry. While labour-related obligations have increasingly been the subject of formal complaints, consultations and dispute settlement procedures, environmental commitments have not generated comparable enforcement activity.

This contribution examines this enforcement gap by focusing on biodiversity-related provisions. Biodiversity offers a particularly useful lens for examining environmental enforcement under EU FTAs. First of all, biodiversity provisions are broad in scope, encompassing a wide range of environmental policies, conservation measures and international commitments, similarly to labour. Secondly, ecosystem-specific issues such as wildlife trade, illegal fishing, and deforestation have direct and tangible implications for trade flows, supply chains and market access (Muller 2024).

The contribution argues that biodiversity provisions are structurally and institutionally disadvantaged within the current enforcement framework, when compared to labour commitments. It advances a multi-causal explanation based on three interrelated factors: treaty design, institutional leverage, and civil society mobilisation. By focusing on three selected FTAs (South Korea, Andean Community, and Vietnam), the chapter first analyses the obligation and precision of biodiversity provisions (Abbot et al. 2000; Muller 2024). Overall, they tend to be framed as aspirational goals or cooperation commitments, with little operational value when compared to labour ones. Second, the contribution explores how the International Labour Organisation and the institutions of Multilateral Environmental Agreements support EU enforcement cases. The ILO’s centralised monitoring, reporting and close collaboration with the European Commission generate authoritative compliance signals and reduce the costs of enforcement activation. By contrast, biodiversity-related international institutions underperform in this area. Third, it considers how these structural asymmetries between shape mobilisation dynamics. Labour actors can emerge more systematically, while environmental ones struggle to move beyond general opposition to trade liberalisation.

This emerging enforcement gap raises questions about whether the EU can credibly claim global leadership on sustainability if its trade instruments systematically fall short of its environmental commitments. By addressing the structural limits of biodiversity enforcement compared to labour, the contribution aims to speak directly to ongoing debates on the future orientation of EU trade policy at a time when new agreements are being finalised.

The inclusion of environmental protection commitments in EU FTAs is a well-established practice which ties into the notion of the EU as a values-based trade actor that uses its economic power to promote sustainable development goals. Yet, in practice, the normative impact of such provisions remains questionable. There is to this date no instance of the EU seeking to enforce these provisions against trade partners. This seems at odds with the EU’s constitutional commitment to promote environmental sustainability as well as its increasing focus on combatting climate change, as illustrated by the EU Green Deal and the growing number of EU unilateral instruments through which the EU seeks to encourage third countries to increase environmental standards at home. Further, the recent ICJ advisory opinion on climate change underscores the centrality of environmental and climate obligations in contemporary international law and confirms an emerging consensus on the legal responsibility of states to address climate change. This paper discusses whether the failure to enforce environmental protection provisions in EU FTAs amounts to a form of normative abdication which contradicts the EU’s constitutionally mandated obligation to promote environmental sustainability abroad and, more generally, compliance with international law.

Sustainable development occupies a constitutional position within EU law and is a guiding value and objective of the Union’s external action and trade policy. As the EU has sought to mobilise trade more strategically in response to sustainability challenges, long-standing questions concerning the coherence of its trade policy have intensified. Historically, these tensions have been managed primarily through conditionality-based mechanisms in EU trade agreements, such as essential elements clauses on human rights and Trade and Sustainable Development chapters promoting the ratification and implementation of international environmental and social standards. Following an extensive review of the effectiveness of this approach, the Commission signalled an important strategic recalibration. Alongside a strengthened approach to conditionality, the Union now seeks to ‘mainstream’ sustainable development across its trade agenda, placing renewed emphasis on prioritising liberalisation-based strategies in strategically significant areas for sustainable development.

In this context, trade in environmental services has assumed renewed prominence within EU trade policy, presented as capable of reconciling trade liberalisation with environmental protection, public health and development objectives. Liberalisation in this sector is expected to deliver not only conventional market-access benefits, but also to facilitate the diffusion of environmental technologies, skills and infrastructure essential for pollution control and longer-term decarbonisation. At the same time, environmental services remain politically sensitive and legally complex, often closely linked to public services, domestic regulatory autonomy and contested models of service provision. While the EU increasingly adopts an open and proactive stance towards liberalisation in this area, such enthusiasm is not necessarily shared by its trading partners, many of whom remain cautious about the distributive, regulatory and developmental implications of services liberalisation in environmentally sensitive sectors.

This paper analyses how environmental services are addressed in EU trade agreements in order to assess the potential of services liberalisation to support the Union’s broader ambition to maintain sustainable development beyond conditionality. It examines whether this strategy represents a meaningful shift in the promotion of sustainable development, or whether it risks re-entrenching sustainability with market-centred liberalisation logics that constrain its transformative potential. Drawing on a selected set of EU free trade agreements with both developed and developing economies, the paper reflects on how current trade practice in environmental services shapes both the scope and limits of the EU’s ambition to act coherently as a leader in sustainable trade governance.

Progress towards gender equality and women’s empowerment (UNSDG 5) is evidently off-track. Women are 30% less likely to participate in the labour market, make up 60% of the informal economy, earn 30% less than men and bear three times the amount of unpaid labour. Trade policies could be an important tool for countering these persistent gender inequalities in the economic sphere, e.g. by eliminating discriminatory taxes (so-called ‘pink tariffs’), creating formal and higher-paying jobs for women, ensuring labour rights compliance in high-risk feminised labour sectors (e.g. textiles) or supporting women-owned businesses. But because trade policies fail to do so, they reinforce existing gender gaps. Economic analysisindicates that closing these gaps would give the global economy a USD 7 trillion boost.

The EU is constitutionally obliged to promote gender equality and has pledged to use trade policy to eliminate gender inequalities both within the Member States and around the world. This political impetus led to the integration of trade and gender equality chapters/clauses in EU free trade agreements (FTAs) and requirements for compliance with international women’s rights conventions in unilateral EU trade instruments. Prior research suggests that these measures are not far-reaching enough. Yet, this research does not suggests ways in which EU trade instruments in general, and their legal design specifically, could be improved.

Against this background, the present article questions how women’s economic empowerment can be enhanced through the legal design of EU trade instruments. After briefly reflecting on the concept of women’s economic empowerment and its link to trade policy, the article explains the current EU approach to women’s economic empowerment for EU free trade agreements (FTAs), focusing on both the negotiations and the legal text of these agreements, with a view to identifying existing shortcomings. Thereafter, the article reflects on (the absence of) gender clauses in unilateral EU trade instruments. The final section includes legal suggestions for enhancing women’s economic empowerment through the legal design of both EU FTAs and unilateral EU trade instruments.

In the new era in which great powers carve out distinct zones of influence on the world map, the middle powers have the capacity to counter the sense of irreversible coercion from lawless raw power . They can oppose attempts at subordination by promoting an alternative order, a distinct architecture of collective problem-solving, as the old one falters.

It needs to be responsive to demands for predictability, solidarity, and respect for sovereignty. If many value the preservation of common goods, from trade to environmental challenges, the difficulty of rallying countries on a global vision is acknowledged. Selected common interests can ground ad hoc coalitions. Rather than building a competing zone of influence, the new order fosters coalitions for convergence, networks of value-based connections.

New frameworks must recognize diversity and differentiation to foster fair collaboration, as “progress is often incremental, (…) interests diverge” (Carney, 2026). The EU and the WTO have valuable experience with variable geometry, regional or multilateral. These experiences hold promise for achieving multi-speed, cooperative international integration.

This research distinctively isolates the legal technology first introduced in the WTO Agreement on Trade Facilitation (TFA) to operationalize variable geometry: the “arc of choice”. This legal technology secures fairness between parties and accounts for their heterogeneity while defining an adaptive trajectory toward a collective goal. The “arc of choice” is experimentalist by design and aims at progressive convergence. Adaptive learning and cooperation processes are at the heart of the technology.

This research first develops a doctrinal examination of the opportunities and defects of the TFA “arc of choice” legal design. It reveals the legal weaknesses arising from an unbalanced bargain when applying the variable-geometry strategy. Second, it draws on the author’s eight years of experience in cooperation programs such as the Trade Facilitation West Africa Program. The empirical study examines the effects of donors’ community and experts’ behaviours on experimentalist processes and the difficulties developing countries face in implementing wicked problems. Third, it enables normative recommendations on effective legal design and institutional enablers for fair experimentalist coalitions in a plurilateral setting. It informs the EU on practical solutions to advance an alternative order beyond coercion, through fair agreements open to the Majority World at the moment of negotiations and implementation.