Date: 2024
Type: Article
Transforming trade, investment and environmental law for sustainable development?
Austrian review of international and European law, 2024, Vol. 26, No. 1, OnlineFirst
PETERSMANN, Ernst-Ulrich, Transforming trade, investment and environmental law for sustainable development?, Austrian review of international and European law, 2024, Vol. 26, No. 1, OnlineFirst
- https://hdl.handle.net/1814/76354
Retrieved from Cadmus, EUI Research Repository
The 2030 UN Sustainable Development Agenda aims at ‘transforming our world’ to protect universally agreed sustainable development goals (SDGs) that – due to globalization – can no longer be secured by any state without international law and multilevel governance of global public goods (PGs). Democratic and republican constitutionalism historically emerged as the most effective methods for protecting local and national PGs demanded by citizens; they need to be complemented by functionally limited, multilevel constitutionalism securing transnational ‘aggregate PGs’ like mutually beneficial trade, investment and environmental protection systems. This contribution explains why commitments to human rights, democratic governance and rule of law have become incomplete safeguards of the SDGs without complementary, constitutional reforms of international trade law (II), investment law (III) and environmental law (IV). Human rights require embedding national ‘constitutionalism 1.0’ and functionally limited ‘treaty constitutions 2.0’ into ‘cosmopolitan constitutionalism 3.0’ empowering and protecting citizens and representative, multilevel governance institutions (V). Constitutional, participatory and deliberative democracy, private-public partnerships (e.g. for inventing and producing vaccines) and citizen-driven network governance (e.g. for decarbonizing economies) remain crucial for providing PGs and for protecting humanity against authoritarian power politics (VI). Are the necessary constitutional reforms politically feasible at a time of Russian wars of aggression aimed at suppressing human rights and democratic governance?
Additional information:
Published online: 11 July 2024
Cadmus permanent link: https://hdl.handle.net/1814/76354
Full-text via DOI: 10.1163/15736512-02601002
ISSN: 1573-6512
Publisher: Brill Nijhoff
Earlier different version: https://hdl.handle.net/1814/74389
Version: The article is a published version of EUI LAW WP 2022/02
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