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 [...]
The concept of sustainability, or sustainable development, articulated in the 1987 Brundtland Report has, since the 1992 UN Conference on Environment and Development, legitimated what Steven Bernside calls the ‘compromise of liberal environmentalism’.[1] This normative paradigm treats environmental protection as compatible with, and often premised upon, the continuation of economic growth, the promotion [...]
In these two blogs, Julia Dehm and Joyeeta Gupta engage the questions of sustainability and environmental justice in contemporary global legal governance. In their blogs we see a common concern with the dominant position of private interest-oriented fields of law. For Dehm, the notion of ‘sustainability’ is situated in the double position of [...]
What might a ‘Sustainable Global Economic Law’ (SGEL) look like, in a context of accelerating ecological degradation, wild levels of inequality and wealth concentration, continuous technological disruption and strong demands for environmental and social justice? This ambitious question was at the heart of the two-day conference convened at the University of Amsterdam Law [...]
In its Circular Strategy 2020-2025, Amsterdam relies on the Amsterdam City Doughnut developed by the British economist Kate Raworth. The model depicts an economy where societies and businesses contribute to economic development while respecting the limits of the planet. The Doughnut provides a playful approach to framing humanity’s challenge of the 21st century: [...]