In Johannesburg at the World Summit on Sustainable Development in 2002, over one hundred and eighty states assumed a collective responsibility to advance and strengthen the interdependent and mutually reinforcing pillars of sustainable development economic development, social development, an environmental protection at the local, national, regional and global levels. This remarkable collection of papers, sponsored by the Centre for International Sustainable Development Law (CISDL), demonstrates that sustainable development serves as a unifying concept with the potential to facilitate much-needed respect for international law and timely implementation of diverse and overlapping international commitments. It builds on the substance of a rich and complex debate at the intersections among economic, social, and environmental law, bringing together a broad cross-section of viewpoints and voices. The authors review recent developments in WTO discussions and negotiations, and in the recent decisions of the WTO Appellate Body, from a sustainable development law perspective. They also survey relevant new developments in trade and economic agreements at regional, inter-regional and bi-lateral levels. The various essays focus on sustainable development aspects of key issues in recent trade negotiations such as the Singapore Issues (investment, competition, trade facilitation, and government procurement), intellectual property rights, investment arbitration and the linkage between the WTO and multilateral environmental accords, (MEAand¿s).. Among the specific topics covered are the following: Emerging areas of law and policy in trade and sustainable development, The underlying development agendas in global trade law negotiations, Cooperation and potential negotiation on international competition law, Sustainable development aspects of intellectual property rights negotiations, Overlaps between multilateral environmental accords (MEAand¿s) and the WTO, Recent developments in WTO dispute settlement procedures and proceedings, Human rights and environmental opportunities from trade liberalisation and increased market acces, Human rights and environment impact assessment techniques used to analyse trade agreements, Recent developments in bi-lateral and regional trade agreements. Trade, investment, and competition law practitioners and negotiators in developed and developing countries will find this book of great value, as will development and environment law professionals with responsibility for trade and WTO law related matters. With rich contributions from leading trade law practitioners, academics, and WTO panel and appellate body roster members, Sustainable Developments in World Trade Law offers a constructive, timely and accessible expert analysis of recent discussions and advances in the field, providing an integrated and essential guide to some of the most important issues in international economic law today.

A multi-disciplinary investigation of how economic globalization can help achieve the UN's 2030 Agenda, exploring trade-offs among the Goals.

This book seeks to answer the questions: how do the rules of international treaties on trade and investment apply to the new laws and policies relating to energy-related trade, and do the rules of the multilateral system contribute to or detract from sustainable development? An emerging set of new problems in the law of international trade is how to reconcile the rules of the multilateral trading system with shortages of certain natural resources and the necessity to develop renewable energy resources. The chapters in this book provide a comprehensive analysis of the international trade issues presented by national trade laws and policies with regard to natural resources and energy. This book is about the extent to which we are interpreting existing rules to cover emerging problems and how the rules of the multilateral trading system can be adapted to achieve sustainable development in natural resources and energy. The book begins with a survey of selected national laws relating to recent restrictions on the export of natural resources, both resources used to produce energy as well as natural resources essential for industrial production. After examining the range of such laws in selected important countries, we turn to the application of the rules of the multilateral trading system to such export restrictions. We discuss the major rules of the World Trade Organization (WTO) as well as the natural resources rules in selected regional preferential free trade agreements. While there is not a comprehensive global legal regime on competition law, we believe it is also important to examine how selected national competition laws impact export restrictions on natural resources. This book will be a major contribution to the international dialogue on international economic law issues with respect to trade in natural resources and energy.

Sustainable development, as defined by the World Commission on Environment and Development, is "development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs." More specifically, sustainable development is a process of change that seeks to improve the collective quality of life by focusing on economically, socially, and environmentally sound projects that are viable in the long-term. Sustainable development requires structural economic change and the foundation of that change is investment. In developing nations with low levels of domestic savings, investment predictably comes from abroad in the form of foreign direct investment. A large and ever expanding number of international investment agreements are in place to govern these transactions. While these accords seek to foster development while mitigating the risk involved in these types investments, many questions remain unresolved. This highly insightful book reflects the contributions of a variety of world renowned experts each of which is designed to provide the reader with valuable perspective on recent developments in investment law negotiations and jurisprudence from a sustainable development law perspective. It offers answers to pertinent questions concerning advancements in investment law, including the negotiation of numerous regional and bilateral agreements as well as the increasing number of disputes resolved in the World Bank's International Centre for the Settlement of Investment Disputes (ICSID), from different developed and developing country perspectives. It lays out future directions for new treaty negotiations and dispute settlement proceedings, as well as ongoing investment promotion efforts, against a background of rapidly evolving international relationships between economic, environment and development law. It focuses on key issues in investment laws which have emerged as priorities in the negotiation of bilateral and regional investment agreements, and have been clarified through recent decisions of the ICSID and other arbitral panel awards.

This timely book provides an accessible insight into how the concept of sustainable development can be made operational through its translation into legal terms. Understood as a multidimensional legal principle, sustainable development facilitates coherent international law making. Using this notion as an analytical lens on the WTO Agreement on Agriculture, the book considers the unresolved question of what a sustainable and coherent agricultural trade agreement could look like.

Climate change remains a global challenge requiring international collaborative action. Another area where countries have successfully committed to a long-term multilateral resolution is the liberalization of international trade. Integration into the world economy has proven a powerful means for countries to promote economic growth, development, and poverty reduction. The broad objectives of the betterment of current and future human welfare are shared by both global trade and climate regimes. Yet both climate and trade agendas have evolved largely independently through the years, despite their mutually supporting objectives. Since global emission goals and global trade objectives are shared policy objectives of most countries, and nearly all of the World Bank's clients, it makes sense to consider the two sets of objectives together. This book is one of the first comprehensive attempts to look at the synergies between climate change and trade objectives from economic, legal, and institutional perspectives. It addresses an important policy question - how changes in trade policies and international cooperation on trade policies can help address global environmental spillovers, especially GHG emissions, and what the (potential) effects of (national) environmental policies that are aimed at global environmental problems might be for trade and investment. It explores opportunities for aligning development and energy policies in such a way that they could stimulate production, trade, and investment in cleaner technology options.