Safeguarding National Environmental Regulation in a Liberalized World: Beyond the Trade Promotion Act of 2002

BY NEIL GORMLEY

Is free trade irreconcilable with sustainable development? Some environmental groups, viewing the regime of international trade and investment liberalization as an obstacle to effective environmental protection, suggest so. While many have criticized specific rules that are seen to impinge the freedom of national governments to regulate environmentally harmful practices, other theorists have gone further to examine structural factors that undermine national regulatory efforts.2 The insight that international trade and investment may undermine national efforts to regulate private enterprise for the public good is not a new one. No less an economic thinker than Adam Smith recognized that international capital, in the presence of free trade, breaks free of the norms of national community. In order for the public good to be asserted under those circumstances, national norms must find expression in the rules that govern trade, making it less than entirely free, or else in some other embodiment of international governance.

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