PhD project: EU Trade Agreements and Sustainable Development (October 2020 — March 2024)

As the world crosses the midpoint of the 15 year-period envisaged to achieve the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), adopted in 2015, troubling figures are coming to light. The global pursuit of the SDGs is significantly off course, with a mere 15 percent of the 140 targets on track to be achieved by 2030 (United Nations, 2023). This backdrop sets the stage for the PhD dissertation, which delves into the nexus between international trade policy and the sustainable development agenda, known as trade and sustainable development, or TSD for short.

This article-based dissertation looks at sustainability provisions in the European Union’s (EU) preferential trade agreements, embodied in so-called Trade and Sustainable Development (TSD) chapters. These chapters concentrate on two aspects of the SDGs: social/labour rights and environmental protection. The overall research question guiding this dissertation is: What are the opportunities and limitations of using EU preferential trade agreements for advancing environmental and social objectives? In addressing the overarching research question, this study focuses on two recent empirical developments in EU trade policy. First, the heightened emphasis on implementation and enforcement, hereunder the recent introduction of sanctions tied to TSD commitments. Second, a strong climate focus following the publication of the European Green Deal (2020), now reflected in both the EU’s internal and external policies (Commission, 2021). While both the environmental and social dimensions of TSD is considered, a greater emphasis is placed on environmental aspects, specifically the Paris Agreement and climate mitigation. Hence, rephrasing the research question, this dissertation explores the potential and limitations of EU TSD chapters in advancing environmental and social objectives in the context of stronger enforcement and a more pronounced climate dimension.

The dissertation adopts an empirically grounded and pragmatic research approach, whereby each article’s research question is informed by recent empirical developments, guiding the selection of relevant theories and methods. The theoretical frameworks applied are highly diverse, ranging from legal analysis assessing the ‘hardness’ of the institutional interlinkage of the Paris Agreement with EU trade agreements to a poststructuralist examination of the subtle hierarchies underpinning the EU and its trade partners’ perceptions and practices on TSD matters. In parallel, a variety of methodologies are employed, including discourse and network analysis, comparative law review, expert interviews, and theoretical work.

The PhD dissertation was written between October 2020 and November 2023 and consists of a dissertation frame and five research articles: (1) The Trade-Sustainability Nexus: The Evolution of the European Commission’s Trade and Sustainable Development Discourse from 1993-2022; (2) Enforcing Trade and Sustainable Development? Uncovering the Motivations Behind the Introduction of Sanctions in EU Trade Agreements; (3) Strengthening the Paris Agreement Through Trade? The Potential and Limitations of EU Trade Agreements for Climate Governance; (4) Balancing Trade and Climate Ambitions: The Role of Strategic Ambiguity in Linking the Paris Agreement to EU Trade Agreements; and (5) Reversing the Gaze in EU Trade Policy: Spatial Hierarchies in the Trade-Sustainability Nexus.

Extract from the PhD Assessment Committee’s assessment

“The thesis is very well-written, well‐argued, and well‐presented. The author demonstrates a very good knowledge of issues and literature relating to EU policy‐making on trade and sustainable development (TSD) issues, its origins, and its impacts. There are a range of innovative methodological approaches taken to explore different aspects of the TSD agenda, there is some originality in how different theoretical insights have been combined, and the findings enrich the TSD literature in a number of ways: 1) the thesis develops and applies new theoretical approaches to navigating the complexity of the trade-sustainability nexus (the bricolage approach, strategic ambiguity, and the four‐quadrant framework), 2) it investigates the climate dimension in relation to the TSD agenda more than previous research has done, and (3) it interrogates the progressiveness of the TSD agenda in terms of its effectiveness, focus vs comprehensiveness, and responsiveness to the views of trade partners”.