Amsterdam’s vision of becoming a sustainable city We have been fascinated by two small bottom-up initiatives in and around Amsterdam: the Community Land Trust in Amsterdam South-East and the so-called Zoöp. In a recent article, we analyse the potential and the limitations of these two bottom-up legal innovations to assess how they could [...]
Can Shell claim to be the Netherlands’ largest investor in green energy in its advertisements? At the start of this month a new Code on Sustainability Advertisement was adopted by the Dutch Advertising Code Committee (Stichting Reclame Code Comissie) – the self-regulation body that deals with rules on advertisements in the Netherlands. Over the [...]
This blog was featured earlier on the Verfassungsblog. September 15th 2022 was a big day for the climate movement. The owner of Patagonia – a large multinational corporation producing wearables – transferred 98% of his shares (worth 3 billion dollars) to the newly established Holdfast Collective, a foundation aimed at fighting climate change. The [...]
The dispute settlement mechanism of the Energy Charter Treaty (‘ECT’) has been proving to be an obstacle for States in their quest to meet climate obligations. The ECT aims to ensure the protection of investments and in turn investors. Any measure implemented by a State that can causes a negative effect to these investments [...]
The work of turning ‘the economy’; ‘the political’ and ‘global law’ from a priori concepts into questions is a critical one for our time, as these forms have come to dominate so much of how everyday activities are framed and valued in communities around the world. By way of cursory background, ‘economy’ comes from [...]
Who defines economy and value in international law? Who is left out? And what are the implications for social and environmental justice? A useful starting point may be to acknowledge that people value different things. In terms of what should constitute ‘the economy’, people count different things and do so in diverse ways [...]
In our discussion about sustainable global economic law last December, Matt Canfield asked us several questions to guide our conversation. We reproduce them to structure our contribution here, which we offer as a dialogue (trialogue, including Matt’s questions). Rather than assigning names, we distinguish our voices with underlining, italics, and unmodified typeface. How [...]
Our conference organizers venture that “in pursuing sustainable global economic law, the question of how we construct and identify the ‘economic’ is critical.” We suggest that one element of this critical question is how actors construct the “economic” as a scale-making project. In 1939, Friedrich Hayek argued for scale-free global trade in part [...]
In pursuing sustainable global economic law, the question of how we construct and identify the “economic” is critical. Anthropologists, sociologists, historians, and scholars of science and technology studies have approached the formation of what we call the economy in a variety of ways, but all acknowledge that the “economy” operates as a framing [...]
On the basis of my work in three projects (co-chairing UNEP’s Global Environment Outlook-6, co-chairing Future Earth’s Earth Commission, and my Advanced Grant on Climate Change and Fossil Fuels), I have three critical messages with respect to environmental justice and law. My perspective on sustainability is influenced by my understanding that we are [...]