Sustainable Development in EU PTAs and the Unilateral Turn in Trade: Competing Governance Modes Toward the Same Goal?

The European Union (EU) has been a staunch advocate of linking trade and sustainable development. Over the years, sustainable development clauses in EU Preferential Trade Agreements (PTAs) have expanded in terms of their scope and level of institutionalisation. They have become treated increasingly on par with more traditional trade issues, including the most recent focus on their greater enforceability through sanctions. The current geopolitical European Commission has opted to pursue unilateral trade and sustainable development policies, such as the carbon-border adjustment mechanism, corporate due diligence directive, deforestation-free initiative and anti-labour coercion regulation. The rise of this unilateral approach raises important questions about its implications for the EU’s traditional bilateral promotion mechanisms, possibly even rendering them obsolete. Ultimately, these two approaches embody two distinct governance logics behind the trade and sustainable development linkage, ranging between the soft, participatory network mode in PTAs and the hard, top-down one in the EU’s new autonomous trade policy. In this paper, we offer a systematic comparison of the institutional logics and implications of these different governance modes for labour and environmental issues in trade. To what extent do these mechanisms complement each other in the pursuit of the same goal? Or will the newly adopted unilateral measures create disruptions within the existing institutional architecture built for the implementation of bilateral agreements, undermining their effectiveness? How do they affect the workings of domestic advisory groups, trade and sustainable development committees and civil society dialogue in PTAs? Finally, we also examine the reception of these two approaches by EU partner states, instrumental for their implementation and effectiveness. Our paper is the first one to identify the interactive institutional logic of the EU’s new strategy for the promotion of trade and sustainable development in the age of geo-economics and trade unilateralism.