Transnational Sustainability Laws Global Law Series

Transnational standards related to the environmental and social sustainability of production processes are becoming commonplace governance tools in the global economy. This book demonstrates how sustainability standards serve two fundamentally different functions: coordination and regulation. Standards can coordinate like-minded businesses in an industry by demarcating common sustainability commitments to distinguish between sustainable and unsustainable sectors of the industry. Yet, standards can also regulate businesses, requiring them to change production and trade practices to align with the sustainability demands of third-parties, including trading partners, advocacy groups, consumers and other civil society constituencies. These two functions reflect the private and public lenses, respectively, through which legal scholars can assess standards as transnational sustainability laws. With key case studies in forestry standards, palm oil standards, and the ISEAL Alliance, this book demonstrates how socio-legal analyses of transnational rulemaking inform debates about global administrative law and the constitutionalization of the global economy.

Introduction; 1. Between co-ordination and regulation: the dual functions of voluntary sustainability standards; 2. The socio-legal analysis of sustainability standards; 3. Governing public forests with private standards: the case of FSC in the Great Lakes region; 4. Certifying global palm oil productions: the case of the roundtable on sustainable palm oil; 5. Meta-regulating sustainability standards: the case of ISEAL alliance; 6. The politics of transnational sustainability laws; Conclusion.

Phillip Paiement is an Assistant Professor at Tilburg University, The Netherlands and received his doctorate at Tilburg Law School in 2015. He has served as an editorial committee member of the journal Transnational Legal Theory since 2014, and as a Board Member of the Dutch Association for Law and Society since 2016. He is also an alumnus of the King's College London Transnational Law Summer Institute and the Harvard Law School's Institute for Global Law and Politics Regional Workshop. In 2015, he co-founded the Translocal Law Collaborative Research Group affiliated with King's College London.