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Trade-Environment Politics: The Emerging Role of Regional Trade Agreements
This paper examines how overlap between trade and environmental issues are managed under the North American Free Trade Agreement, and specifically the role of that the Commission for Environmental Cooperation (CEC) Secretariat plays in this process. We demonstrate how the CEC Secretariat has influenced trade-environment politics, primarily through knowledge brokering in ways that build state capacity to collaborate across borders on trade-environment issues. Specifically, we demonstrate how the Secretariat has influenced decisions related to budget allocations, cooperative activities between member
states, the creation of new institutions, and evaluating allegations of parties’ failures to enforce environmental laws. Moreover, we argue that this case raises important questions concerning the appropriate role of secretariats in international politics and has important policy implications with several new secretariats currently being set up under the burgeoning number of regional trade agreements under negotiation by the United States and many others.
Recently negotiated linkages between trade and environmental agreements have the potential to enhance environmental regime effectiveness in ways that have been impossible under environmental treaties alone. Specifically, the 2009 U.S.—Peru Trade Promotion Agreement (TPA) contains the most prescriptive environmental directives found in any U.S. trade agreement to date and pioneering provisions linking environmental treaty implementation to the TPA’s much stronger dispute-settlement procedures. The combination of these two elements has begun to catalyze Peru’s implementation of relevant environmental provisions and a corresponding potential for regime effectiveness improvements. Simultaneously, these prescriptive provisions contributed to catastrophic social unrest in Peru that must be acknowledged and addressed by policy makers in the United States and abroad before this agreement is exported to other countries.
Many environmental and social nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) see the World Summit on Sustainable Development as either a failure or a lost opportunity. What lessons can be learned from this summit? Will NGOs need to change how they put forth their central messages?
The WTO is often portrayed as a dangerous threat to the environment. But this reputation is largely undeserved, because the trade body has in fact developed principles that accommodate both trade and environmental concerns. There are several steps it can take, however, to make sure the green trend continues.
Environmentalists have not always been of the same mind regarding the World Trade Organization (WTO) or the aggressive liberalization of trade. While many have warned about accelerating distorted and unsustainable growth patterns, others have seen opportunities to improve the
efficiency of global resource use or to ratchet up national environmental standards where they are weak. But in the wake of the battle in Seattle and ve years of experience with the WTO, it is increasingly clear that the hyperliberalization of trade is inimical to the quest for global ecological
sustainability in several ways. The WTO has proven to be profoundly anti-environmental both procedurally and substantively, handing down environmentally damaging decisions whenever it has had the chance to do so. Fears of a race to a dirty bottom are proving prescient, and optimism that trade rules can be greened from within has waned appreciably. Moreover, the problem is not just the obvious threat to local environmental quality from the forces of globalizing market pressures. We are also seeing the undermining of global-scale efforts at environmental
protection, through the destabilization of several important international environmental regimes and the commodification of critical global cycles and ecosystem services. As a result, environmental opposition in the era of confrontation inaugurated in Seattle is likely to be stronger, more unified, and less willing to tinker on the margins.
This article presents a detailed critique of the WTO Appellate Body's Shrimp-Turtle interpretation of the Article XX chapeau. It asserts as a premise that Article XX is itself an integral part of the GATT meant to preserve national prerogatives with respect to certain policy realms, and is thus not subordinate to other GATT objectives. Shrimp-Turtle's interpretations of Article XX(g) have clearly erased certain mistaken interpretations that blocked use of Article XX in the past, but the Appellate Body has reinstated equivalent obstacles through its erroneous interpretation of the "arbitrary or unjustifiable discrimination" test of the chapeau. Conceding that the U.S. embargo was applied in certain minor ways (since corrected) that were discriminatory, the article notes that these aspects were the least important to the Appellate Body's analysis. On the major points of the report, the article first questions whether there was "discrimination" at all in the U.S. embargo. But even if there was discrimination, it was neither arbitrary nor unjustifiable. The Appellate Body analysis was overly broad, lacked textual basis, and departed from the interpretation of the same test in the SPS context. The keys to the Appellate Body's conclusion of unjustifiable discrimination - the intended and actual coercive effect of the embargo and the failure of the U.S. to pursue multilateral negotiations - have nothing to do with "discrimination." Moreover, they touch on national environmental policy choices of the precise type Article XX was meant to shield from trade-based discipline. As a matter of its own legitimacy and as a means toward its own goal of supporting sustainable development, it is vital for the WTO to loosen the constraints on Article XX.
This article analyzes several unresolved issues in World Trade Organization (WTO) law that may affect the WTO-consistency of measures that are likely to be taken to address climate change. How should the WTO deal with environmental subsidies under the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT), the Agreement on Agriculture and the Subsidies and Countervailing Measures (SCM) Agreement? Can the general exceptions in GATT Article XX be applied to other agreements in Annex 1A? Are processing and production methods relevant to determining the issue of 'like products' in GATT Articles I and III, the SCM Agreement and the Antidumping Agreement and the TBT Agreement? What is the scope of paragraphs b and g in GATT Article XX and the relationship between these two paragraphs? What is the relationship between GATT Article XX and multilateral environmental agreements in the context of climate change? How should Article 2 of the TBT Agreement be interpreted and applied in the context of climate change? The article explores these issues. Oxford University Press 2009, all rights reserved, Oxford University Press.
Recent years have seen a sharp growth in the number of regional agreements both concluded and under negotiation. This paper attempts to document and discuss this growth focusing on US, EU, Chinese, Indian and other agreements. The form, coverage and content of these agreements vary considerably from case to case. The paper asks why so many, why the variation in form, and why the recent acceleration. Implications for the trading system are discussed in a final section. © 2008 The Author Journal compilation