Integrating Sustainable Development concerns within Trade Agreements: Diverging Histories, Narratives and Practices

Abstract The concept of ‘sustainable development’, since its introduction, altered the rules of international law. Since the General Agreement on Tariff and Trade 1947, international trade is about making the flow of trade freer. At the same time, the idea of ‘sustainable development’, became the progressive counterforce against the logic of market liberalisation that goes against environment and social protection. Eventually, the language and logic of sustainability are also embedded within the legal framework of international trade. Some see ‘trade and sustainable development’ (TSD) as progressive agenda, at the same time, the concept of ‘sustainable development’ is controversial in the eyes of the Global South. Arguably, sustainability logic would entail environment or social protectionism, defeating economic development interest of the South. Thus, the dynamics still persists despite the development. This paper addresses the question on how the idea of ‘sustainable development’ merged with norms of international trade and consequently made rules of TSD to emerge in trade agreements. By using not only (legal) textual but also (legal) contextual and subtextual analysis of a trade agreements as the method, it traces historical contexts and trajectories that ultimately lead up to the different approaches in integrating the language of sustainability within trade agreements. The paper takes a distinctive approach with earlier scholarships that predominantly discusses sustainability from trade agreements of the Global North. This paper asserts that, albeit disagreement and contention do still persist between North and South on the scope and interpretation of sustainability within the rules of international trade, at general notion the idea of ‘sustainability’ permeates and repeats into practices of the Global South in their FTAs.