Transforming world trade and investment law for sustainable development

Abstract

Transforming World Trade and Investment Law for Sustainable Development explains why the 2030 UN Sustainable Development Agenda for ‘Transforming our World’—aimed at realizing ‘the human rights of all’ and seventeen agreed Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs)—requires transforming the United Nations (UN) and World Trade Organization (WTO) legal systems, as well as international investment law and adjudication. UN and WTO law protect regulatory competition between diverse neo-liberal, state capitalist, European ordo-liberal, and third-world conceptions of multilevel trade and investment regulation. However, geopolitical rivalries and trade wars increasingly undermine transnational rule of law and effective regulation of market failures, governance failures, and constitutional failures. For example, the intergovernmental negotiations in the context of the 1992 UN Framework Convention on Climate Change have failed to prevent or considerably limit climate change. In order to prevent trade, investment, energy, and climate conflicts, sustainable development requires reforming trade, investment, and environmental rules and dispute settlement systems. The global health pandemics confirm the need for constitutional reforms of multilevel governance of global public goods. Investment law and adjudication must better reconcile governmental duties to protect human rights and decarbonize economies with the property rights of foreign investors. The constitutional, human rights, and environmental litigation in Europe enhances the legal accountability of democratic governments for protecting sustainable development, but European economic constitutionalism has been rejected by Anglo-Saxon neo-liberalism, China’s authoritarian state capitalism, and many third-world governments. The more that regional economic orders (like the China-led Belt and Road networks) reveal heterogeneity and power politics block UN and WTO reforms, the more the US-led neo-liberal world order risks disintegrating. UN and WTO law must promote private–public network governance, civil society participation, and stronger judicial accountability in order to stabilize and depoliticize multilevel governance of the SDGs.