Sustainable Development in International Law Making and Trade

This book provides a magisterial account of the history, conceptualization, and institutionalization of the concept of sustainable development in international law and policy-making. It provides helpful and insightful illumination of these issues, both at a general level and specifically through an extended case study of the evolution of the WTO Agreement on Agriculture - a particularly appropriate choice of case study given that agriculture implicates a wide range of divergent values, including the economic benefits of free trade; promoting access to affordable food; protecting small subsistence farmers, especially in developing countries; and minimizing environmental degradation through over-exploitation of natural resources such as fisheries or soil depletion or contamination. An overarching and constructive theme of the book is the need for greater legal coherence in international lawmaking across these various domains which are often fragmented in institutional silos that lack effective integrating mechanisms.’ - Michael Trebilcock, University of Toronto, Canada;‘Sustainable development, now made fully operational thanks to the contribution of Elisabeth Burgi Bonanomi, can support policy reforms that will improve global governance, thus ensuring that the trade regime is shaped to support the policy objectives that it is meant to serve. The area of food and agriculture is in many ways a case study of a lack of consistency across policy areas. It is now high time to overcome this failure. I have no doubt that this volume represents a major contribution towards this end.’ - Oliver De Schutter, Member of the UN Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights; ‘Understanding the problems of global food governance through the lens of sustainable development provides an important way of reinvigorating the increasingly fractious debate about how, if at all, the WTO Agreement on Agriculture should be changed to accommodate the contemporary challenges of global food security. Elizabeth Burgi Bonanomi’s book is an interesting and very welcome addition to the literature.’- Fiona Smith, Warwick University, UK

Elisabeth Bürgi Bonanomi, Attorney at Law and Senior Lecturer, World Trade Institute and Centre for Environment and Development, University of Bern, Switzerland

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