Ecological Sensitivity and Global Legal Pluralism : Rethinking the Trade and Environment Conflict

The tension between trade liberalization and environmental protection has received remarkable attention since the establishment of the WTO.

It has triggered a wide-ranging debate, and played a central role in the discourse of the anti-globalization movement.

This book offers a critique of this debate. It argues that in its focus on the WTO, this debate has failed to take account of the institutional and discursive complexity in which the trade-environment conflict is embedded.

A legal investigation of this nexus requires a framework of inquiry in which this complexity can be elucidated; in other words, a model of global legal pluralism.

This book offers such a model.A pluralistic portrait of the trade-environment conflict has important practical lessons.

It means that the trade-environment conflict cannot be resolved by uniform economic or legal formulas.

Coping with this conflict requires polycentric and contextual strategy.

The book's second part explicates this general argument by examining several global legal domains (from the WTO to "private" transnational regimes).

This part demonstrates how the different discursive and institutional structures of these domains have influenced the contours of the trade-environment problem, and considers the policy implications of this diversity.