This article examines how legal systems can coordinate tensions between environmental standards and trade competition in the era of next-generation free trade agreements. The study is motivated by the growing gap between increasingly stringent external green trade requirements, especially in the European Union (EU), and the fragmented domestic legal architectures of developing countries such as Vietnam (European Commission, 2019; European Parliament and Council, 2023; UNDP Vietnam, 2022). Existing scholarship has extensively discussed trade-environment interaction either as a doctrinal conflict between legal regimes or as a policy problem of sustainable development, but it has paid less attention to coordination failures across norms, institutions, and compliance infrastructures. In response, this article develops a coordination governance model and applies it through an adaptive coordination-transplant framework for developing countries. Using comparative legal analysis of the EU and Vietnam, with particular reference to the EU-Vietnam Free Trade Agreement (EVFTA), the article finds that Vietnam’s principal weakness lies not in the absence of environmental commitments as such, but in the lack of normative integration, inter-ministerial coordination, and product-level compliance infrastructure for carbon-related trade obligations. The article argues that the EU’s relevance lies not in offering rules to be copied mechanically, but in illustrating a functional governance ecosystem combining carbon pricing, border reporting, transition support, and administrative coordination (European Commission, 2022, 2023, 2025). On that basis, the article recommends a sequenced reform package for Vietnam consisting of a Prime Minister–anchored coordination council, legally structured green public procurement, and phased carbon-traceability obligations for export-exposed sectors. The article contributes to the literature by reframing trade-environment tensions as failures of coordination governance rather than classical conflicts of law and by proposing a capacity-sensitive model of legal transplantation for developing economies.
Nguyen et al. (Tue,) studied this question.