The EU’s internal and external pesticide regulation policies have recently evolved towards a new approach characterized by differentiated stringency. This new approach is crystallized in the Commission strategy ‘Vision for Agriculture and Food’ of February 2025. Differentiated stringency refers to the different set of rules on the use of pesticides produced within and outside the EU: while internal policies to reduce the use of pesticides for food produced within the EU have been halted, external policies promote more stringent rules regarding food imported from outside the EU. Regarding food produced in the EU, the Commission withdrew its proposal for a Regulation that aimed at halving pesticide use by 2030 and that was part of the European Green Deal. Regarding imported food, the Commission committed to reinforce policies on pesticide residues, with an emphasis on global competitiveness which deviates from its longstanding liberal approach to trade. The resulting differentiated stringency between internal and external pesticide policies constitutes a shift from a focus on regulating the EU internal market and liberalizing trade to proactively protecting this market. This new approach follows contestation of EU pesticide regulation policies by the European Parliament, some EU member states as well as agricultural interest groups and NGOs. However, it remains unclear to which of these actors the Commission responded, for which reasons, as well as what exactly were the drivers of the apparent deviation from key Commission principles. Therefore, this paper investigates the precise mechanism connecting contestation and the emergence of differentiated stringency in the Commission’s approach to pesticide regulation. Based on a theory-testing process-tracing analysis, it triangulates three data sources: [1] 30 semi-directive interviews with members of agricultural interest groups as well as policy-makers in the Commission, Member States and the European Parliament; [2] EU official documents; and [3] media outlets specialized in European affairs and regulation of pesticides. Beyond explaining the recent shift towards differentiated stringency in the Commission’s approach, the paper contributes to a better understanding of the politicization of a technical regulatory policy field with major economic and health impacts, and it advances research on the linkages between internal and external EU policies.

This paper traces the EU’s shift from a predominantly environmental-regulatory paradigm—epitomized by the European Green Deal—to a more explicitly industrial climate policy in which the Commission increasingly “orchestrates” markets to build clean-tech capacity and resilience.

The core argument is that intensifying systemic competition with the United States and China, alongside supply-chain shocks, has exposed the limits of “rule-setting only” and pushed the EU toward a governance model that couples climate ambition with industrial capabilities.

In its initial phase (2019–2021), the EU consolidated its normative power through binding targets: climate neutrality by 2050 and at least −55% emissions by 2030, operationalized via the Fit for 55 package. Key levers included reform and expansion of the Emissions Trading System (ETS), strengthened effort-sharing, updated renewables and energy-efficiency directives, tighter CO₂ standards for vehicles, and broader measures on biodiversity and circular economy. The Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism (CBAM) externalized the carbon price at the EU’s border, aiming to curb carbon leakage while reinforcing the “Brussels effect.” In parallel, sustainable finance instruments—taxonomy and corporate/financial disclosure regimes—sought to redirect private capital by defining what counts as “sustainable” and making firms and products accountable through transparency requirements.

A second phase emerged as geopolitical volatility and “clean-tech competition” reshaped incentives for private investment. The U.S. Inflation Reduction Act offered long-horizon, bankable tax credits and rapid investment signals; China leveraged long-term industrial policy, scale, and control over strategic inputs (including critical raw materials and refining). Against this backdrop, Europe’s concern became not only decarbonizing demand, but also where production capacity would locate—and whether regulation without comparable investment certainty would drive capital abroad.

The EU response is a recombination of climate, internal market, and industrial tools: Net-Zero Industry and Critical Raw Materials initiatives to accelerate permitting, establish strategic projects, set targets and concentration thresholds, and coordinate via boards and implementing acts; the Chips Act as a template for “first-of-a-kind” capacity building and crisis mechanisms; and a more permissive, coordinated approach to state aid to enable targeted support. A “defensive” layer (foreign subsidies, anti-coercion, trade defense, screening) frames de-risking as an operating principle.

The paper concludes that the EU is not abandoning environmental goals, but re-embedding them in an industrial strategy: climate as the end, industry as the means, the single market as the platform, and the Commission as orchestrator—while managing risks of market fragmentation and ensuring social and intergenerational fairness.

This paper discusses a key question of how international investment law may interconnect and complement EU laws in promoting Corporate accountability and ESG commitments. While numerous studies in recent years criticise the ineffectiveness of EU ESG regulation, rare literature turns towards the international law toolbox in ESG regulation and discusses how international law can complement the EU regulatory framework and promote corporate ESG commitments and accountability in the EU. ESG Regulations in the EU are often ‘studied in isolation’ and rarely consider multi-layered interactions such as that between EU regulatory action and international law. However, the transnational nature of ESG regulation requires a higher level of harmonization and international cooperation.ESG is essentially a public law issue—it is about market design and governance, and it concerns the distribution of costs of externalities, the proper inter-state cooperation tools, and the function of all institutions, public and/or private, in ESG promotion. Generally, there are four international ESG regulatory approaches: the UN-led initiatives, the OECD standards, international investment law, and International Investment Contract.

The research is broadly inductive, seeking to qualitatively and empirically identify the ‘regulatory interconnectivity’ between international law and the EU ESG regulatory framework. It qualitatively analyzes literature and legal documentations concerning international investment treaties and EU-ESG regulatory framework, to identify, catogorize and compare key regulatory measures. Subsequently, this paper uses social network analysis (SNA) to visualize the proxies and similar expressions for links between legislative instruments, policy instruments, and documents. After lemmatizing the text of the ESG legal instruments with WordNet, it defines connections as the set of semantic edges, which are defined by a first-order semantic similarity measure between EU ESG laws and ESG provisions in EU investment treaties. It also distinguishes the divergencies of these laws in terms of the corporates’ ESG obligations, the enforceability mechanismm and the remedy/accountability mechanism of non-compliance. Additionally, doctrinal analysis of ISDS jurisprudence and EU case llaw complements provide empirical evidence and comparison of the regulation of corporates’ ESG obligations. Literature concerning EU ESG regulation concentrate on corporate law and finance law, the EU ESG regulation have been analysed systematically in relation to international law to a limited extent. This paper contributes to filling this research gap by identifying the interconnectivity and complementarity between international investment law and EU ESG regulation. It aims to offer a strategic and innovative framework for promoting corporate accountability and enhancing ESG commitments.

European Union (EU) environmental policy rests upon a paradox. It is generally accepted in the literature that the EU has had profound and positive effects upon its member states' environmental policy ambition and that it has been a leader in international environmental diplomacy. However, the defining characteristic of EU environmental policy underpinning its success - framing policy as a market correcting measure - has also been its Achilles' heel. EU environmental policy has been grounded within a capitalist growth model that has contributed to worsening environmental outcomes and which has privileged the interests of large corporate actors. Moreover, since 2022 there has started to be push back at the national and European levels against elements of the EU’s Green Deal, and against neocolonial tendencies represented by policies such as the Critical Raw Materials Act. How do we explain this contestation and the internal tensions within the EU environmental policy paradigm and what are the implications for its future development?

This paper suggests that the approach of political ecology can bring novel insights to the field of EU environmental studies to unpack and explain the trajectory of EU environmental policy, arguing that the economistic rationale and win-win narrative underpinning the EU environmental policy paradigm has foreclosed more radical policy opportunities and sown the seeds of current challenges and trends such as the roll out of the Omnibus simplification packages. It makes a contribution to the field by suggesting new avenues for analysing and understanding EU environmental policy and politics moving beyond the traditional approaches that dominate the state of the art