This lunchtime seminar, hosted by the UNSW CIBEL Centre, will begin with lunch at 12:30, followed by a seminar at 1:00pm by Visiting Professor Leonardo Borlini (Bocconi University) on The International Trilemma of Liberalization, Security, and Sustainability.
Recent years have seen the growing and expanding use of legal tools to further geopolitical objectives. Trade-related measures serve as an important means of pursuing these objectives, either through explicit restrictions, conditions, or barriers on market access or indirect measures that have the effect of doing so. Many of these measures are undertaken unilaterally in a manner that contravenes international trade rules or exploits exceptions on the basis of national security.
In parallel, countries are pursuing sustainability objectives to address climate change—such as green industrial policy to foster investment in climate mitigation and adaptation, carbon tariffs, and sustainability commitments in bilateral trade agreements—through a range of policy measures with implications for international law. In a growing number of contexts, countries attempt to pursue security and sustainability objectives simultaneously, often by imposing conditions and restrictions on the trade of environmental goods that are deemed to be geopolitically important, thereby securitizing what should be a global public good.
In other instances, countries prioritize security or sustainability objectives while still acting bound to reciprocal commitments to liberalize market access under international trade law. The rules and institutions of the international trading system have not yet evolved to address this new reality. These developments involve tradeoffs between liberalization, security, and sustainability that international law has yet to reconcile, which this Article likens to a trilemma in which different policy objectives are mutually incompatible.
Employing comparative analysis of green industrial policies and related trade-specific policy measures by the United States and the European Union, this Article analyzes conflicts with international trade law, identifies and assesses the causes and effects of tradeoffs, and considers the implications of the sustainability trilemma for governance of the global economy and humanity’s responses to climate change. As the sustainability trilemma shows, the nature and degree of tradeoffs between compliance with trade rules, the protection of economic security, and climate action vary from country to country. In response, this Article offers measures to amend and re-structure the legal architecture of the international trading system as a means to reconcile the competing incentives and imperatives posed by climate change and geopolitics.