Global Sustainable Development and Trade Agreements : Toward a Green Bargain

Trade is a tool to increase human welfare and development, but is increasingly being harnessed also to achieve broad environmental and social sustainability. This paper evaluates the modern relationship between trade and distribution of wealth, on the one hand, and trade and sustainable development, on the other hand. It shows that the purely domestic and purely monetary “embedded liberalism” bargain described by Polanyi and Ruggie can be internationalized and made sustainable, as part of an integrated bargaining process that has already begun in increasing linkages between trade and climate change policy. Demands for sustainability should be understood as a call holistically to maximize multi-dimensional aggregate welfare, and adding the goal of “development” to form “sustainable development” adds the call for an ethically and politically sustainable distribution of welfare. Separation of topics of discussion, isolating trade from these other goals, has made it difficult to organize and negotiate cross-sectoral exchanges between states