Pushing for Sustainability Abroad: EU Environmental Unilateralism and its Legal Limits

Its Treaties require the European Union (EU) to promote sustainable development in all its policies and activities, whether internal or external. In this regard, the EU increasingly relies on unilateral measures which build on a consumption-based approach to address sustainability concerns beyond its borders. Simply put, these instruments make market access—directly or indirectly—dependent on compliance with EU sustainability rules, aiming to steer the behavior of EU and non-EU market actors and thus allowing the EU to export its view on sustainability also to the rest of the world. However, as a series of recent conflicts highlight, such environmental unilateralism often finds its limits in international (trade) law. The present Chapter analyses these tensions in the context of the ongoing palm oil dispute between the EU and Indonesia in the World Trade Organization (WTO). It shows that even “indirect sustainability rules” are prone to conflict with key WTO standards and that their fate depends on their justification, which ultimately proves difficult when global concerns are addressed unilaterally.