This event is organised by the Working Groups on Environmental Law and Governance and International Economic Law.
Fragmentation has long been understood as a challenge for international law, undermining universal principles and harmonisation of standards. In international trade, multilateralism is the ideal, but the establishment of preferential trade agreements has been accepted as a necessary tool for promoting trade liberalisation overall. The COVID-19 global pandemic tested the contours of fragmentation, with increasing protectionism and nationalist sentiment being the default responses by nations, using export and import restrictions on essential medical supplies and vaccines despite the need for global collaboration to alleviate the impact of the pandemic. Since then, trade rules have been undermined, with national tariff strategies advocating for protectionism rather than multilateralism. Trade and fiscal tools are also being used to disincentivise economic behaviour that conflicts with domestic social policies, such as environmental and labour protections. These trends combine the rebalancing of the international economic order with national priorities over global ones, reshaping the relationship of nations to international law and with one another, and leading to unpredictability in trade, in climate change mitigation, and in energy security. Weakened global institutions are unable to manage the global disruption, and regions are finding themselves in need to adjust geopolitical alliances.
While trade relations seem chaotic, local and regional social policy making continues, addressing global challenges like climate change and supply chain management without necessarily using international institutions to assist in global coordination. Economic transitions are occurring, with digitalisation becoming the new norm both for businesses and for the sustainability revolution. Fragmentation rather than harmonisation is embedded in this policymaking. In a multi-polar world with little global cooperation and fewer avenues for the implementation of the rule of law, how can fragmentation render new bottom-up solutions for transitioning economies towards more sustainable ones? What is the role of fragmentation in international economic law in moving forward sustainable development goals concerning the environment?
This presentation proposes that an emerging sustainable development governance model must account for fragmentation in international trade and environmental law, so that nations may have the necessary social policy space needed to develop meaningful local decarbonization policies and access to justice strategies for local communities dealing with environmental justice challenges. In examining the role of fragmentation in trade, the working paper identifies three mini-models of trade regimes that provide lessons for trade’s role in an emerging sustainable development governance framework. Though these models are important first steps towards encapsulating local and regional social policy values in trade, none of these models adequately reflect the goals of a sustainable development governance model that fully incorporates local needs and strategies with global principles. New perspectives on trade’s relationship to sustainability goals are needed, ones that will also push trade principles in a direction that better aligns local decarbonisation strategies and environmental justice concerns with global sustainability policies.
Elizabeth Trujillo is the Mary Ann & Lawrence E. Faust Professor of Law and the Founding Director of the Initiative on Global Law and Policy for the Americas. She is currently a recipient of the Fernand Braudel Senior Fellowship at the European University Institute (spring 2025). Prior to joining the University of Houston in 2019, she was Professor of Law at Texas A&M University School of Law (2016-2019), and at Suffolk University School of Law in Boston (2007-2016) where she received the 2012 Latina Trailblazer Award by the Hispanic National Bar chapter, Massachusetts Association of Hispanic Attorneys. She has also been a Visiting Professor at Florida State University School of Law (2005-2006), a Visiting Scholar at Harvard University Law School (2011-2012), and an Alexander von Humboldt Research Fellow at the Max Planck Institute for Comparative Law and International Law (2015-2016).
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