Ecological Sensitivity and Global Legal Pluralism

Book excerpt: The tension between trade liberalization and environmental protection has received remarkable attention since the establishment of the WTO. It has been the subject of a wide-ranging debate, and was one of the central themes of the anti-globalization movement. This book explores this debate. It argues that by focusing on the WTO, this debate failed to understand the institutional and discursive complexity in which the trade-environment conflict is embedded. A legal investigation of this nexus requires a framework of inquiry, which is capable of elucidating this complexity - a model of global legal pluralism. This book develops such a model. This pluralistic viewpoint portrays the trade and environment conflict as the product of multiple dilemmas, constituted and negotiated by a myriad of institutional and discursive networks. As such, this conflict cannot be analyzed or understood through one-dimensional models. Viewing the trade-environment conflict through pluralistic lenses yields important practical insights. It means that this conflict cannot be resolved by uniform economic or legal formulas. Dealing with this conflict requires, rather, polycentric and contextual strategy. The empirical part of the book explicates this thesis by examining several global legal domains, ranging from the WTO to "private" transnational regimes such as transnational litigation and the field of international financial law.