Synopses & Reviews
Synopsis
The tension between trade liberalization and environmental protection has received remarkable attention since the establishment of the WTO. It has been the subject of a wide-ranging debate, and was one of the central themes of the anti-globalization movement. This book explores this debate. It argues that by focusing on the WTO, this debate failed to understand the institutional and discursive complexity in which the trade-environment conflict is embedded. A legal investigation of this nexus requires a framework of inquiry, which is capable of elucidating this complexity - a model of global legal pluralism. This book develops such a model. This pluralistic viewpoint portrays the trade and environment conflict as the product of multiple dilemmas, constituted and negotiated by a myriad of institutional and discursive networks. As such, this conflict cannot be analyzed or understood through one-dimensional models. Viewing the trade-environment conflict through pluralistic lenses yields im