This text examines the vital connections between trade, environment and development. It argues that current international trade rules and institutions must be significantly reformed to address environmental concerns while still promoting economic growth and development.

In this first book to systematically compare how each of the world's major international trade organizations have handled environmental issues, leading specialists provide a balanced analysis of the development of trade and the environment rules in the World Trade Organization, the European Union, the North American Free Trade Agreement, the Free Trade Area of the Americas, the Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation forum, the International Organization for Standardization, and other key organizations. Deftly combining policy and theory, the authors offer a range of heuristics and normative orientations in an effort to understand one of the globe's most contentious and timely dilemmas. Visit our website for sample chapters!

First exploration of the significance of international trade for the environment.

A comprehensive, critical analysis of the interactions between investment, trade and the environment. It examines the consequences of existing multilateral investment and trade regimes, including the WTO and the MAI for the environment, and asks how they should be reformed to protect it. In doing so, the text shows how these regimes can be greened without erecting protectionist barriers to trade that frustrate the development aspirations of poorer countries. The solution seeks to offer a way out of one of the most difficult dilemmas in international policy: how investment and trade can protect the environment without encouraging protectionism by the industrialized world.

How the environmental provisions in US preferential trade agreements affect both the environmental policies of trading partners and the effectiveness of multilateral environmental agreements. As trade negotiations within the World Trade Organization seem permanently stalled, countries turn increasingly to preferential trade agreements (PTAs) between smaller groups of nations. Many of these PTAs incorporate environmental provisions, some of which require trading partners to enact new domestic environmental laws, and use the enforcement mechanisms available within trade agreements as tools for environmental protection. In Greening through Trade, Sikina Jinnah and Jean-Frédéric Morin provide the first detailed examination of how the environmental provisions in US preferential trade agreements affect both the environmental policies of trading partners and the effectiveness of multilateral environmental agreements. They do so through a combination of in-depth qualitative case studies and quantitative analysis of an original dataset of 688 global PTAs. Jinnah and Morin explore the effects of linkages between PTAs and environmental treaties and the diffusion of environmental norms and policy through PTAs. Centrally, they argue that US trade agreements can serve as mechanisms both to export environmental policies to trading partner nations and third-party countries and to enhance the effectiveness of multilateral environmental agreements by strengthening their enforcement capacity. They caution that PTAs are not a panacea for environmental governance; deeper problems of unsustainable consumption and differential power dynamics between trading partners must be carefully navigated in deploying trade agreements for environmental protection.