Beyond Multilateral Treaty Reforms

Abstract

International trade law is primarily concerned with facilitating the flow of goods and services across national borders by minimizing tariff and non-tariff barriers to trade. However, there is a nexus between international trade and the environment. First, international trade is reckoned to have destructive environmental effects. The liberalization of global trade results in increased economic activity, including industrial processes, manufacturing, innovation of new technology, and extraction of natural resources from the earth and the sea, which inevitably results in environmental externalities such as biodiversity loss, pollution, and climate change. Second, international trade law intersects environmental law whenever trade restrictive measures such as import bans, export control and border taxes are adopted by states as a means of achieving environmental goals.[1] Such measures condition market access on the fulfilment of environmental norms related to the characteristic of the product or the process of its production. The World Trade Organization (WTO) currently oversees the largest multilateral regime for international trade. WTO covered agreements expressly recognises some exceptions to trade liberalization commitments for environmental objectives, this policy space is subjected to a system of strict limitations and review procedures designed to protect the global trading system from arbitrariness and disguised restrictions on trade. This scrutinized policy space accounts for the contention that the multilateral trading system constrains environmental regulation and requires treaty reforms for the purpose of adapting to contemporary environmental concerns. Others have focused on a change of approach in the reasoning of WTO adjudicators in their review of trade-restrictive environmental measures. However, the process of multilateral negotiations for new agreements needed to effect rule change is notably complex and has been fraught with deadlocks in the last couple of decades. The stalemate over appointment of members of the Appellate Body has hampered the effective functioning of third-party adjudication in the WTO and the prospect of ‘pro-environmental’ approaches in the interpretation of WTO law on environmental measures. Meanwhile, numerous environment-related measures continue to be notified within the WTO. I argue that notwithstanding the absence of treaty reforms, international trade law continuously evolves through various formal and informal norm-generating practices by member states and trade stakeholders. Viewed through the lens of legal pluralism, these practices contest, modify and transform normative meaning in the multilateral trading system thereby creating a permissive setting for trade-restrictive environmental measures within the framework of extant international trade law.