Reinventing trade, environment and development interlinkages: lessons from the EU–Mercosur Association Agreement

The trade pillar of the EU–Mercosur Association Agreement (EUMAA) has demonstrated critical problems with the way in which the EU handles interlinkages between trade, environment and development in its free trade agreements, particularly through its Sustainability Impact Assessments and Trade and Sustainable Development Chapters. But instead of prompting fundamental change, key EU actors have responded by merely tinkering with the existing model. This article explores why such an approach is insufficient to address the urgent ecological and developmental challenges which EUMAA specifically, and EU trade agreements more generally, currently ignore. It argues that the sustainable development paradigm underlying the EU’s trade and sustainability agenda must be strengthened through the explicit incorporation and then operationalization of the concepts of planetary boundaries and socio-economic equality. It utilizes the example of EUMAA to demonstrate the kind of concrete changes that could flow from this strengthened sustainable development paradigm including (I) the creation of radically different negotiating processes (II) the utilization of trade measures within FTAs to achieve key environmental and developmental goals and (III) the redistribution of environmental and developmental responsibilities among key actors who are the subjects and objects of trade governance.