No dia 10 de Abril, Maria Weimer, (Chair of EU law, European Studies, University of Amsterdam) será a oradora de um seminário do Grupo de Investigação RIGoP com o tema From Territorial Extension to Transnational Governance: Rethinking the Legitimacy of EU Unilateral Sustainability Regulation. A partir das 11h, online.

Abstract:

To fulfil its sustainability commitments at a time of failing multilateralism, the EU has in recent years increasingly resorted to unilateral regulation to set global sustainability standards. This paper is interested in the normative legitimacy of EU unilateral sustainability regulation, which it examines through the example of supply-chain measures, such as the EU Deforestation Regulation. This measure bans various agricultural commodities on the EU market, where they have been produced on deforested land. Like other supply-chain measures, EU unilateral regulation with extraterritorial effect sets standards for economic production abroad and uses market-access, due diligence obligations and and transnational regulatory cooperation to enforce such standards. Scholarship on the global reach of EU law has largely justified such measures through a jurisdictional frame: they are presented not as unlawful extraterritoriality, but as forms of territorial extension grounded in a territorial nexus to the EU market and supported by EU constitutional commitments to environmental protection, sustainability, and value-based external action. I argue that this normative framework is no longer adequate. While territoriality continues to ground the normative justification of EU regulatory unilateralism, itno longer accurately describes the authority being exercised. Drawing on recent work on Nico Krisch’s work on jurisdiction as global governance under conditions of economic interdependence and asymmetric power relations as well as on Saskia Sassen’s work on territory as capability and a practice of claim making that constructs jurisdiction rather than justifying it, I show that EU unilateral sustainability regulation is better understood as a form of functionally grounded transnational regulatory governance. It operates through market-access conditionality, due diligence, traceability, benchmarking, administrative cooperation, and transgovernmental networks, thereby shaping conduct and institutional reform across borders. The paper argues that, once EU unilateralism is understood in these terms, its legitimacy cannot be grounded in legality, territoriality, and procedural consultation alone. Instead, this new form of transnational regulatory authority calls for a rethinking of normative legitimacy and for stronger and more differentiated forms of accountability and justification.