Neoliberal Environmentalism, Climate Interventionism and the Trade-Climate Nexus

Abstract

Trade has become an increasingly core part and defining feature of our globalising world economy, and so by default has become integrally linked to climate change and action. Trade has not only rapidly expanded over recent decades but also driven contemporary economic development and growth, especially in countries where carbon and other greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions have too risen sharply. Increasing attention has consequently been afforded to the nexus between trade and climate change. Trade is now a key front for climate action. For some time, neoliberal environmentalism has been viewed as the dominant discourse on climate policy and other aspects of environmental governance. However, it has been very rarely applied to, or its relevance tested against the trade-climate nexus specifically. The paper presents a study on this relationship based on new original empirical research and the investigation of the following hypotheses or research questions. To what extent has neoliberal environmentalism thus far dominated mainstream international and global discourses on trade-linked efforts on climate action? What have been the principal features of neoliberal environmentalism within these discourses? Do the results of the study’s empirical research suggest the need to include other relevant analytical approaches to develop a better comprehension of how trade-climate nexus issues are being addressed? In addressing the above the paper develops an analytical framework comprises modelled normative elements of neoliberal environmentalism as well as relevant concepts of state-market relations. This frames the discursive evaluation of the study’s research that is based on a multi-stage, in-depth text analysis of 37 key publications produced by global economic institutions (GEIs) on the trade-climate nexus from 2007 to 2022. Market-based instruments (MBIs) were found to be by far the strongest normative element in this text corpus. This subsequently provided scope for exploring whether different forms of ‘climate interventionism’ were evident in the trade-climate nexus, and thus more nuanced and alternative understandings of the subject. The paper’s main contribution to the literature on this subject is to open up ideas and debate concerning how important aspects of neoliberal environmentalism overlap with, and can be better understood in the context of state-market relations. Evidence from this study’s research suggests that in the trade-climate nexus discourse there exists considerable space for states and international institutions to adopt, promote and innovate different forms of climate interventionism through various trade policy and governance actions. It is further argued that MBI-based trade related policies can only take us so far in climate action efforts. More ardent forms of state and other institutional interventions, from the local to the global-international levels, are required to ultimately achieve increasingly urgent climate goals.

1. Introduction

As trade has become a more integral and core part of today’s global economy and defining feature of globalisation, so it has also become ever closer linked to climate change and action. By the early 2020s, trade accounted in some way for around 60 percent of global economic activity [1]. It has been a key driver of economic growth and development, especially in fast industrialising carbon-intensive economies such as China and India. The rapid expansion of international supply chain connections between firms worldwide has led to a burgeoning rise in the transportation of materials and goods across the planet. As a consequence of these and other factors, increasing attention has been afforded to the nexus between trade and climate change.

For some time, neoliberal environmentalism has been viewed as the dominant discourse on climate policy and other aspects of environmental governance. Neoliberal environmentalism applies the principles of economic liberalism—such as marketisation, privatisation, property rights, free enterprise, open markets, and the monetarization of resources—to environmental issues and problems. It is a conceptual fusion of neoliberal values and environmentalist culture that among other things advocates the ‘greening’ of capitalist systems and activities, and thereby business practices such as international trade. Governments, companies and international institutions have generally exhibited a demonstrable predilection for neoliberal environmentalism because it offers a non-radical, less disruptive approach to addressing important challenges like climate change based on established policy conventions, including the continued pursuit of economic growth and capitalist accumulation albeit in ‘greened’ forms.

Despite the dominance of the neoliberal environmentalism discourse in policy, business and institutional circles, it has been very rarely applied to, or its relevance tested against the trade-climate nexus specifically. The paper presents a study on this relationship based on new original empirical research and new conceptual thinking. It develops an analytical framework founded on four modelled normative elements of neoliberal environmentalism, namely: 1. ideological principles, concepts and theories; 2. green growth and sustainable development; 3. monetarisation and privatisation of nature; 4. market-based instruments. In addition, the framework incorporates relevant concepts of state-market relations in the development of the paper’s analysis and main conclusions drawn. This frames the discursive evaluation of the study’s research that is based on a multi-stage, in-depth text analysis of 37 key publications produced by global economic institutions (GEIs) on the trade-climate nexus from 2007 to 2022 Its research methodology adopts aspects of grounded theory, discourse analysis and interpretive analytics. In the first-stage text analysis, the GEI publication documents were formed into a text corpus and uploaded into NVivo (version 12) software. Tests were then run to establish and catagorise relevant terms (e.g., concepts, policy measures) under each of the four modelled normative elements of neoliberal environmentalism. The second-stage text analysis involved checking frequency of reference for each categorised relevant term within the text corpus as a proxy significance test. Patterns of normative influence and approach on trade and climate matters were more deeply explored in the third-stage text analysis, where the most prominent eight GEI publications from the text corpus were further scrutinized within the study’s analytical framework.

The main motivation behind this research is to investigate the following hypotheses or research questions. First, to what extent has neoliberal environmentalism thus far dominated mainstream international and global discourses—as embodied in relevant GEI published works—regarding trade-linked efforts on climate action? Secondly, what have been the principal features of neoliberal environmentalism within these discourses? Thirdly, do the results of the study’s empirical research on the above suggest the need to include other relevant analytical approaches to develop a better comprehension of how trade-climate nexus issues are being addressed at the highest institutional level? Given how strong neoliberal approaches to policy and practice have become across the world, we may expect this paper’s research results to affirm the broad dominance of neoliberal environmentalism in this critically important aspect of trade-climate nexus studied. While it was found this held true in terms of a generalised results outcome, there was a heavy skewing in the text corpus of 37 key GEI publications towards market-based instruments (MBIs), this being evidently by far the strongest normative element of neoliberal environmentalism. It is argued that this research finding from of the study provided scope for exploring whether different forms of ‘climate interventionism’ are evident in the trade-climate nexus, and thus more nuanced and alternative understandings of the subject from more of a state-market relations perspective.

The study is structured as follows. The fundamentals and rise of neoliberal environmentalism are first outlined, noting how since the 1980s it has shaped the broader discourses on and approaches to environment-related policies, including those advocated by GEIs that are powerful forms of agency in this regard. After then setting out the modelled normative elements of neoliberal environmentalism, relevant conceptual perspectives on state-market relations are introduced—most importantly Polanyi’s ‘double-movement’ approach—before discussing the study’s main research findings and analysis.

In exploring these issues, this study engages with wider discussions on how trade and trade policy can most effectively be used to tackle climate change. Its main contribution to the literature on this subject is to open up ideas and debate concerning how important aspects of neoliberal environmentalism overlap with, and can be better understood in the context of state-market relations. Evidence from this study’s research suggests that in the trade-climate nexus discourse there exists considerable space for states and international institutions to adopt, promote and innovate different forms of climate interventionism through various trade policy and governance actions. It is contended that this is symptomatic of lacking faith in self-regulating markets alone to deal with the critical ‘long crisis’ of climate change. It is also argued that movement towards a more climate interventionist approach on trade matters would allow for more effective alternative paths of action being pursued. The predominance of MBIs found in the study’s text analysis suggests scope for this but that more ardent forms of interventionism by states and other institutions will be required to address climate change challenges more effectively.

2. Neoliberal Environmentalism

2.1. Neoliberalism and Environmentalism

Harvey [2] has provided perhaps the most well-known definition of neoliberalism, namely “a theory of political economic practices proposing that human well-being can best be advanced by the maximization of entrepreneurial freedoms within an institutional framework characterized by private property rights, individual liberty, unencumbered markets, and free trade” (page 22). Brenner et al. [3] offer a more succinct definition of neoliberalism as “a politically guided intensification of market rule” (page 184) in the public realm. Neoliberalism can also be viewed as a governing rationality that “disseminates market values to every sphere of life” (Brown [4] page 3). From an historic perspective, Ruggie [5] contended that ‘embedded liberalism’ fundamentally underpinned the post-1945 Western order led by a market-liberal United States, based for example on an open trading system and a belief that domestic government interventions were only required to maintain essential economic and political stability. Neoliberalism strengthened its ground in the 1980s under the Thatcher and Reagan administrations, this further consolidated in the 1990s by the so-called Washington Consensus centred on Western capitalism’s apparent triumph over Soviet communism and growing dominance of neoliberal-oriented values and programmes within global economic institutions like the World Trade Organisation (WTO), World Bank and International Monetary Fund (IMF). As with many amorphous meta-concepts, neoliberalism has been subject to different interpretive understandings in the academic literature and additionally assumptions made by some scholars that their definition or comprehension of neoliberalism is universally accepted [6,7,8]. Neoliberalism is furthermore often extendedly applied to other subjects or phenomena, ‘neoliberal environmentalism’ being an example [9,10,11].

Environmentalism meanwhile emerged as a modern cultural movement during the 1960s and 1970s, founded on key works highlighting the ecological limits, constraints and major problems associated with modern industrialism [12,13,14,15,16,17,18]. Most stressed the global inter-connected nature of the ecological challenges facing humanity, and how notions of theoretically unlimited economic growth were intrinsically problematic [19,20]. Early environmental policy and legislation introduced in the early 1970s mainly comprised ‘command and control’ regulatory measures, for example direct bans, limits and fines on pollution emissions [21]. The rationale for such state interventions were to correct market failure arising from mainly negative externality spill-over effects. However, the ascendance of neoliberalism shifted the emphasis to market-based solutions and more seductive ideas concerning ‘sustainability through growth’ [22,23]. Some degree of conflation between environmentalism and neoliberalism also occurred at a relatively early stage as explained below.

2.2. Rise of Neoliberal Environmentalism

We can trace the origins of neoliberal environmentalism to the ideas of US-based theorists, the most prominent being Terry Anderson, John Baden, P.J. Hill, Fred Smith and Richard Stroup, who from the early 1970s started to develop new concepts of free market environmentalism (FME) that drew considerable inspiration from both Austrian and Chicago Schools of neoclassical economics [24,25,26]. Their view on the environment was notably anthropocentric. For instance, Anderson and Leal [27] asserted that, “the “free” in free market environmentalism refers to the individual liberty that only markets can provide; and without that human freedom, environmental quality will be of little consequence” (page 8). Similarly, Jeffreys [28] proposed that, “government has an important role to play in protecting the environment, but it must also protect the rights of individuals… Rather than reject man as an interloper, free-market environmentalists see man as the current culmination of natural evolution” (page 7). With especial relevance to later discussion on sustainable development, this is indicative of how both FME and neoliberal environmentalism perceived ‘the environment’ as a sub-system of the (market) economy, thus countering the proposition that no economic activity is possible outside the planet’s biosphere that supports all life. FME furthermore framed environmental problems as essentially economic ones with market-based solutions based on the monetarisation and privatisation of nature in which property rights applied to environmental resources best conserved and sustainably managed them [24,29,30,31,32].

Concepts and ideas of FME gradually evolved into what became later known as neoliberal environmentalism (NE). The landmark works of Bernstein [33,34,35] provided a deeper understanding of NE and its growing influence. He charted how ascendent neoliberalism brought about a norm complex change in environmental policy-making and governance from local-national to global-institutional levels. Norms can be defined to actions, ideas or practices that are commonly adopted by actors, forming the basis of standardised or ‘normalised’ behaviour [36]. A norm complex is a cluster of closely related norms that can form the basis or elements of an ideological or theoretical position. This has close associations with discourse analysis. A dominant discourse structures the legitimate knowledge regarding certain subjects or problems such as climate change, consequently also determining accepted conventions on best courses of action to resolve them [37,38,39]. They often possess strong ideological identity (e.g., neoliberal-oriented) and their formation can be highly politicised and contested by different power interests [40]. More generally, a norms complex’s influence on policy depends significantly on its institutionalisation regarding its embodiment in laws, conventions on policy design and institutional discourses [35]. Norm complexes embedded in powerful international and global institutions have more considerable impact through their structural influence over national governments and other actors [41].

In the global institutional context, Bernstein observed how the environmental protection norm complex of ‘command and control’ regulatory interventions underpinning the United Nations 1972 Stockholm Conference on the Human Environment was superseded under the influence of FME/NE thinking by the United Nations (UN) 1987 ‘Our Common Future’ report’s promotion of ‘managed sustainable growth’ [42]. Not long afterwards, the UN’s 1992 Rio Earth Summit more firmly established the norm complex of (neo)liberal environmentalism and the belief that free trade, liberal markets, the privatisation of resources (or commons) and sustainable economic growth best served global environmental protection. This was further consolidated by the market-based methods deployed in the 1997 Kyoto Protocol of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), such as the Clean Development Mechanism that was essentially an emissions trading instrument awarding offset credits to mainly developed countries funding carbon reductions in developing countries. Other scholars [43,44,45,46,47] also laid important scholarly foundations on the study of neoliberal environmentalism around this period, and later [22,38] and others contributed key works on how neoliberal environmentalism had over time shaped global institutional norms on climate policies and governance.

2.3. The Trade-Climate Nexus and Neoliberal Environmentalism

Growing public concern about climate change has led to various factors and issues becoming increasingly linked to it, trade being amongst the most important. From one perspective, anthropogenically caused climate change can be primarily understood as a consequence of human economic activity worldwide. Trade has accounted for a growing share of this, from around 30 percent of global gross domestic product (GDP) in the 1970s to roughly 60% by the 2020s [1]. It has moreover become a defining feature of the contemporary global economy, shaping its functional aspects, binding it together in new complex ways, and driving forward its development albeit asymmetrically. Thus, trade has become increasingly relevant to climate change due to deepening connections with causal global economic activity. In addition, advancements in both technology and transnational business operations have created more sophisticated cross-border trade arrangements, such as domestic-international supply chains. Consequently, many domestic economic policy measures impact on international trade flows, drawing them into the ambit of trade policy and governance. This includes climate action policies such as carbon pricing and carbon markets but there are also a growing number of overt trade policy measures with a climate action purpose. The most well-known of these are carbon border adjustments that are essentially import tariffs or taxes which factor in the carbon footprint of internationally traded products. The European Union is currently implementing a scheme for these measures and other major trade powers including the US, UK and Japan are contemplating doing the same [48].

The trade-climate nexus put simply concerns the growing linkages between climate action and trade. Early work on the subject focused on WTO-UNFCCC regime interaction, carbon taxes and trade competitiveness, and carbon leakage impacts on international supply chain trade [49,50,51,52,53,54,55]. Later studies examined the burgeoning links between trade and climate policies [56,57,58,59]. Most relevant of these to this study was Eckersley’s [60] application of neoliberal environmentalism to understanding how the global climate regime had become subordinate to the global (neoliberal) trade regime. She observed by the late 2000s that NE was the dominant norms complex straddling both regimes and had been broadly accepted by the elite decision-making climate community. Both endorsed sustainable development and green growth, as well as advocacy of an open trading system. Eckersley [60] further proposed that dominant or hegemonic transnational discourses will generally determine the “framing and managing the relationship between overlapping regimes that might otherwise be in conflict” (page 14), using the example of a speech given at the UNFCCC 2007 Bali climate summit by then WTO Director-General Pascal Lamy, who argued that trade liberalism creates the wealth and innovation for climate protection. Eckersley [60] is a very rare example of where the trade-climate nexus has been analysed specifically from neoliberal environmentalism perspectives.

Apart from the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), it was furthermore not until the late 2000s/early 2010s that GEIs paid serious attention to the trade-climate nexus (see

Table 1. GEI Publications Text Corpus.

No.	Institution	Year	Publication	Format
1a	WTO	2007	Lamy: Doha could deliver double-win for environment and trade	Speech (press release)
1b	WTO	2008	Lamy: A consensual international accord on climate change is needed	Speech (press release)
1c	WTO	2009	Lamy underscores the urgency of responding to the climate crisis	Speech (press release)
1	WTO	2007–2009	DG Pascal Lamy speeches on trade-climate, late 2000s [69,70,71]	Speech (press releases)
2	World Bank *	2008	International Trade and Climate Change [72]	General Report
3	UNCTAD	2008	Interface Between Trade and Climate Change Policies and the Role of UNCTAD [73]	Official Note
4	WTO-UNEP *	2009	Trade and Climate Change [74]	General Report
5	WEF	2010	From Collision to Vision: Climate Change and World Trade [75]	Discussion Paper
6	OECD	2011	Trade in Services Related to Climate Change [76]	Working Paper
7	WTO	2011	The Interface Between the Trade and Climate Change Regimes: Scoping the Issues [77]	Working Paper
8	OECD	2016	Carbon Footprint of Global Trade [78]	OECD Briefing Paper
9	OECD	2017	Climate Change and Trade Policy Interaction [79]	Working Paper
10	OECD	2017	International Trade Consequences of Climate Change [80]	Working Paper
11	UNCTAD	2018	Climate Policies, Economic Diversification and Trade [81]	General Report
12	WTO-UNEP *	2018	Making Trade Work for the Environment, Prosperity and Resilience [82]	General Report
13	OECD	2020	The Climate Challenge and Trade: Would BCAs Accelerate or Hinder Climate Action? [83]	Background Paper
14	World Bank *	2020	How Could Trade Measures Being Considered to Mitigate Climate Change Affect LDC Exports? [84]	Working Paper Report
15	WTO	2021	Trade Policies Adopted to Address Climate Change [85]	Information Brief
16	G7	2021	UK Summit, Trade Ministers Communiqué [86]	Communique Statement
17	G20	2021	Trade and Investment Ministerial Meeting [87]	Communique Statement
18	OECD *	2021	OECD Work on Trade and the Environment, 2008-2020 [88]	General Report
19	UNCTAD *	2021a	Climate Change, Green Recovery and Trade [89]	General Report
20	UNCTAD	2021b	Trade and Environment Review 2021: Trade-Climate Readiness in Developing Countries [90]	General Report
21	WEF *	2021	Delivering a Climate Trade Agenda: Industry Insights [91]	General Report
22	World Bank *	2021	The Trade and Climate Change Nexus, Urgency and Opportunities for Developing Countries [92]	General Report
23	WTO	2021a	Climate Change in Regional Trade Agreements [93]	Information Brief
24	WTO	2021b	Carbon Content in International Trade [94]	Information Brief
25a	WTO (TESSD)	2020	WTO Communication on Trade and Environmental Sustainability Structured Dialogue (TESSD)	WTO Communication
25b	WTO (TESSD)	2021	New Zealand TESSD Communication (5 Feb 2021)	Member Communication
25c	WTO (TESSD)	2021	EU TESSD Communication (8 Feb 2021)	Member Communication
25d	WTO (TESSD)	2021	Switzerland TESSD Communication (8 Feb 2021)	Member Communication
25e	WTO (TESSD)	2021	Iceland TESSD Communication (12 Feb 2021)	Member Communication
25f	WTO (TESSD)	2021	Japan TESSD Communication (12 Feb 2021)	Member Communication
25	WTO (TESSD)	2020–2021	WTO’s TESSD communications [95]	Official Communications
26a	WTO	2022	WTO Members Discuss Measures to Tackle Climate Change (Committee on Trade and Environment)	Webpage (May 2022)
26b	WTO	2022	Trade and Climate Change homepage	Webpage (May 2022)
26c	WTO	2022	Activities of the WTO and the Challenge of Climate Change	Webpage (May 2022)
26d	WTO	2022	The Impact of Trade Opening on Climate Change	Webpage (May 2022)
26e	WTO	2022	Climate Change and the Potential Relevance of WTO Rules	Webpage (May 2022)
26	WTO	2022	WTO Website, main relevant text content [96]	Webpage (May 2022)

Note: * Core GEI publication used in the study’s third-stage analysis.

). In the 2010s there was a surge of interest in trade-climate aspects of free/regional trade agreements (FTA/RTAs) that by this time had become the principal front of trade diplomacy [61,62,63]. This has remained the main focus of trade-climate academic studies, as well as reconciling trade and climate agendas within global-international governance structures [64,65,66,67,68]. While the WTO has become more focused on the subject, it has yet to introduce any trade rules specifically relating to climate protection. Meanwhile, the UNFCCC has largely eschewed any connection with the trade-climate nexus.

3. Modelling the NE Norms Complex

Following on from the above discussion of the concept, neoliberal environmentalism can be fundamentally understood as a norms complex comprising four main normative elements, namely:

• Ideological Principles, Concepts and Theories
• Green Growth and Sustainable Development
• Monetarisation and Privatisation of Nature
• Market-based Instruments

This modelling of NE is developed below and forms the core part of this study’s analytical framework. Each normative element provides a lens through which we can analyse different manifestations of neoliberal environmentalism, helping conceptually define and explain it to a deeper level. Strong interlinkages exist between the four normative elements, and their connections with the trade-climate nexus are also outlined below.

3.1. Ideological Principles, Concepts and Theories

This normative element focuses on NE’s philosophical and ideological approach, including core underpinning concepts and theories such as economic liberty, liberalisation, free trade, marketisation and comparative advantage. For Ciplet and Roberts [22], neoliberal environmentalism “refers specifically to contemporary stages of regime development in which market-based principles come to eclipse or negate those of precautionary and equity-based concerns” (page 150). Derivatively linked to early FME thinking, a key ideological principle of neoliberal environmentalism is libertarian justice from which stem the primacy of individual liberties and ‘freedoms’, upholding of property rights, rational pursuits of self-interest leading to optimal efficiency outcomes, and voluntarism regarding environmental responsibility. NE is also ideologically grounded in public choice theory [97,98] that conceives politics as a constant struggle between competing ideas and interests, where politicians seek to advance their own interests and simultaneously endeavour to balance those of various other power groups. Thus, according to this view, climate change is caused more by government failure than market failure [37,99]. Dawson [100] exemplifies this approach, claiming that “the Austrian perspective on environmental policy is founded on the argument in Mises (1949) that externalities are a pseudo-problem, arising not from market failure but from an inadequate allocation or defence of private property of rights” (page 58), and advocated a complete dismantling of all climate action policies, relying instead on property rights based legal (litigation) processes to resolve greenhouse gas (GHG) emission issues and disputes between involved parties, including on trade-climate related issues.

3.2. Green Growth and Sustainable Development

This element is primarily concerned with NE’s end purpose and ultimate aims. Neoliberalism is synonymously associated with capitalism, being mutually founded on the principles of economic liberty and the pursuit of wealth and human betterment. Green growth is thus a core norm of neoliberal environmentalism, its supporters contending that capitalist development and accumulation can continue expanding along environmentally sustainable pathways. Strong connections here exist with sustainable development, first universally popularised by the aforementioned UN ‘Our Common Future’ [42] report that anthropocentrically defined it as: “meeting the needs of the present generation without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs” (page 43). By the 1992 Rio Earth Summit both the sustainable development and climate action discourses within GEIs had co-opted trade liberalism as a mechanism to help achieve the respective goals of both linked agendas [22]. According to Keil [101], sustainable development could be understood as being primarily concerned with sustaining capitalism itself, while Methmann [102] proposed that both sustainable development and green growth encompassed a set of disparate of often contradictory policy prescriptions, and somewhat detached at times from environmental aims. This is relevant to the later discussion on the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). For example, SDG-8′s promotion of ‘economic growth’ plays more to conventional ideas of capitalist accumulation meeting human income-material needs than addressing climate change and other ecological challenges.

Neoliberal environmentalism’s championing of green growth and general ‘greening’ of business-as-usual approach has close associations with ecological modernisation theory that advocates incremental adjustments to incumbent economic and social systems rather than urgent deep structural change [103,104,105,106]. Trade is highly relevant here given its growing importance in these processes. The founding Treaty of the UNFCCC [107] clearly complies with this normative element of neoliberal environmentalism, stating in Article 3.5 of the document that its Parties, “should co-operate to promote a supportive and open international economic system that would lead to sustainable economic growth and development in all Parties, particularly developing country Parties, thus enabling them better to address the problems of climate change” (page 5). There are thus acknowledgements here to green growth and neoliberal market expansionism based on free enterprise and trade given its centrality to a ‘supportive and open international economic system’.

3.3. Monetarisation and Privatisation of Nature

The prime focus of this normative element is the relationship between the market economy and natural or environmental resources. Neoliberal environmentalism suggests that nature should be viewed as and converted into economic assets to essentially monetarise or commodify nature in order to save it [108]. Safeguarding environmental (including climate) resources, it is argued, is therefore best achieved through their private ownership based on well-defined, enforceable property rights. Relatedly, climate change and environmental problems are caused by failures to commercially value ecological resources and systems as well as the service products they provide. Pricing environmental resources within actual or hypothetical market constructs can potentially create a ‘pan-planetary metrics’ for monetarising natural resources and their internationally traded exchange [23,44,109]. Thus, from this perspective, “Nature would earn its own right to survive through international trade in ecosystem services and permits to pollute, access to tourism and research sites, and exports of timber, minerals, and intellectual property rights to traditional crop varieties” [45], page 133. This particular approach is often referred to as the ‘neoliberalising of nature’ [110,111,112,113].

The above further embodies NE’s anthropocentric framing of the environment, contrasting with more inter-disciplinary approaches that blend social science and natural science conceptions which position humanity as part of broader eco-systems dynamics [114]. Neoliberal environmentalism furthermore views eco-systems and nature generally in terms of their service-providing capacities rather than the static masses of resources they embody [115,116,117]. Here, our natural world is conceived as a biospheric service economy in which natural capital circulates through global circuits of finance and commodity markets, with resulting multiple connections to trade [20,118]. Links here exist with Polanyi’s [119] later discussed ‘fictitious commodities’. From this normative element perspective, environmental goods and services (EGS)—and especially their climate-EGS sub-category—refer though more to human-made products and technologies such as renewable energy, and thus can be largely differentiated from ‘natural’ environmental resources. Nevertheless, EGS products are still assigned the market-framed terms of ‘goods and services’ and situated in different commodified trade contexts as later discussed.

3.4. Market-Based Instruments

This last normative element centres on policy practice. Market-based instruments (MBIs) became popular with many governments from the 1980s onwards after growing concerns about the effectiveness and administrative costs of ‘command and control’ regulations. MBIs provided an alternative approach and extended environmental policies into new areas, simultaneously offered more favourable compromises to business on regulatory compliance [99]. Eco-taxes were an early example of MBIs, these being particularly focused on managing demand behaviours, e.g., fossil fuel consumption. Another was tradeable permits based on an emission allowance system designed to achieve GHG abatement in production processes. Early MBI practitioners argued that establishing a market price for emissions created an effective mechanism for incentivising firms to amend their actions whilst avoiding government administrative costs and rent-seeking behaviours, this being consistent with the previously discussed public choice theory [21]. At the same time, MBIs are often used to correct market failure. For instance, carbon taxes (and pricing) and feed-in tariff (subsidies, to promote renewable energy adoption) aim to mitigate the negative externalities causing climate change. Carbon border adjustments are essentially carbon import tariffs that account for trade-induced rises in GHG emissions. Other examples of relevant trade-related MBIs are free/regional trade agreements with climate action provisions, international emission trading schemes, internationalised carbon markets and (intellectual) property rights that are especially applicable in trade-linked foreign direct investment cases.

From this study’s perspective, MBIs can be seen as harnessing trade-related market mechanisms to incentivise climate action behaviours, this involving some level and certain forms of state intervention that can have international dimensions. Some have proposed that MBIs signify how the state’s role has simply shifted from being a provider of regulatory public goods to that of market facilitator, offering different kinds of regulatory, legal and policy support to private sector actors engaged in marketised exchanges [111,117,120]. The extent to which environmental market orders are regulated by the state, and the deployment of MBIs and other policy instruments to this end creates scope for considering whether different degrees or variants of, or deviation from neoliberal environmentalism are at work. The ideas and research presented in this study addresses this proposition by exploring in relation to the trade-climate nexus whether certain forms of climate interventionism are being promoted.

4. State-Market Relations and Climate Interventionism

In discussing various political economy discourses on climate change, Swaffield [38] broadly differentiates between the ‘reform’ approach of neoliberal environmentalism that emphasises the ability of the market to best address the problem, and the ‘revolutionary’ approach that identifies the market as the cause of problem itself, instead advocating more radical interventions and co-ordinations of collective action undertaken by the state on climate protection. This study explores the middle ground between these two positions regarding the trade-climate nexus, investigating the extent of neoliberal environmentalism’s influence on this front and where also aspects of climate interventionism are evident. In this matter, variations in types and levels of ‘interventionism’ exist and can include deeper involvements of the state (or government) in institutionalising market order through new forms of trade-climate policy innovation as well as market-correcting regulation and standards-forming actions, thus in contrast to the classic neoliberal ‘minimalist state’ where private enterprise alone effectively rule free self-regulating markets in the economy. Climate interventionism can also include international-multinational co-operation on an inter-governmental basis involving non-state actors. In further developing this analytical framework we next bring different models of, and conceptual approaches to state-market relations into discursive consideration.

Karl Polanyi’s [119] landmark work, ‘The Great Transformation’, laid out his ‘double-movement’ concept, referring to the dual process of marketisation and social protection ‘countermovements’ accompanying that marketisation. In his deep historic study of market economies, Polyani argued that while markets were powerful drivers of dynamic economic change they relied on states and other institutions for their development and often creation, noting that, “there is nothing natural about laissez-faire; free markets could never have come into being by merely allowing things to take their course” (page 139). This challenged the neoliberal view on the natural order of, and inevitable path towards self-regulating market economic systems [121]. Polanyi eschewed both neoliberal and socialist political economy approaches, and any system based on antagonist state-market relationships. Contending that state regulation was essential to ensure markets delivered benefits to society, he further argued that the commodification of land, labour and money—termed ‘fictitious commodities’—left them susceptible to volatile market forces that is turn created social dislocations and other problematic outcomes. They were ‘fictitious’ because they were not technically produced or processed, and therefore should not be considered as monetarised saleable goods. Commodification of land and labour in particular reduced them to proprietary assets, thus contradicting their true intrinsic value: the biophysical world does not exist to serve capitalist accumulation and wealth-generation [39,122]. State actions were therefore required to protect them.

While Polanyi did not explicitly refer to land in the same environmental contexts we do today, we can strongly infer the inclusion of ‘nature’ in his analysis on state-market relations, as Wanner [39] suggested “in the form of ‘natural capital’ and the creation of markets for ‘nature’ and its products and services, in particular through payment for eco-system services” (page 23). In the opening pages of ‘The Great Transformation’, Polanyi [119] furthermore remarked that a free-market economy could not exist “for any length of time without annihilating the human and natural substance of society” (page 3), and although he wrote very little on nature-society relations generally, there was a clear political-ecological thrust to his core arguments [123,124]. Thus, some equivalence may be drawn between Polanyian social protection and the climate protection ‘countermovement’ actions of states, where the energy and dynamics of markets are utilised but under forms of state intervention management.

Polanyian analysis has been applied critically to neoliberal environmentalism and efforts to address climate change [39,123,124,125,126,127,128]. For example, Stuart et al. (2019) argued that measures such as carbon markets were not authentic or adequate countermovements of socio-environmental protection, rather a neoliberal marketisation exercise and commodification of nature. Instead, more radical ‘degrowth’ policies [118,129] were qualifiable as they prioritised environmental and social goals over market-driven economic growth. Taking a contrary view, Carton [125,130] argued that carbon markets, carbon trading and other climate-related MBIs were aligned with Polanyi’s ideas on countermovement policy interventions as they did not necessarily have to be as ‘progressive’ or anti-market ideological as Stuart et al. [128] suggested. This debate raises questions concerning what exactly is being marketised and the long-term efficacy of applying market mechanisms to tackle climate change. If it is not beneficial or ‘good’ natural resources (e.g., forests) subject to commodification but instead environmentally harmful carbon emissions then is this less problematic? Or does the marketisation and trading of these emissions provide some legitimate basis to continue indefinitely burning fossil fuels through the creation of trade-linked internationalised carbon markets as a way to tackle to climate change? Aside from related debates on whether carbon emissions themselves can be considered a Polanyian fictitious commodity [126,131,132,133] such MBIs can be linked with state policy and institutionally determined goals of eliminating all future emissions, going beyond offset-dependent ‘net zero’ targets. On their own, however, carbon markets cannot achieve this. More generally, marketisation applied to climate action can only get us so far. Other non-market-based climate interventionist measures, such as bans on fossil fuel use and technology, are ultimately required to fully decarbonise economic activity, including trade.

The regulation state [134,135,136] and competition state [137,138,139] models of state-market relations both have grounding in Polanyi’s work, each considering the state’s constant readaptation of its role in modern capitalist economies. While regulation per se may be viewed from an NE perspective as intrinsically a state technocratic and political-interfering activity, the main functional mission of the regulatory state is to enhance the efficacy of markets in delivering benefits to wider society. Policy interventions are deployed to that effect which guide and stimulate economic activity towards achieving the state’s broad policy goals, including climate protection and other environmental objectives. Similarly, the competition state entails a refunctionalisation of government management of the economy, superseding the Keynesian welfare state by promoting competitive marketisation and efficiency with the overarching objective of making society more fit for competition in the world marketplace. In both models, the delineation between the state and market—and the fundamental interests associated with them—can be ambiguous [137,139]. Furthermore, they may be viewed from a certain perspective as extensions of neoliberalism given the emphasis on marketisation as a basis for state action as well as compliance with capitalist-oriented methods and goals.

A wider debate exists on how state interventions can ultimately serve neoliberal ends. In a later work, Cerny [140] discussed how the laissez-faire economics of Anglo-American neoliberalism contrasted with German-style ‘ordoliberalism’ based on a strong constitutive rule-based economic order. Although at the core of both was the advancement of marketisation and market efficiency, he contended that the former viewed the market as a ‘spontaneous order’ with a largely unengaged state whereas the latter proposed the institutionalisation of market order through corrective regulation to avoid anti-competitive cartelisation, rent-seeking behaviours and other undesirable outcomes. Cerny observed that in reality governments adhering to either ‘liberalism’ practiced extensive ad hoc re-regulation and interventionism when confronted with complex, unforeseen shock events such as global financial crises and pandemics. Connections here can be made on Polanyi’s social protection ‘countermovement’ state interventions to bring about market efficacy outcomes.

In one sense, climate change represents a complex ‘long crisis’ that has required almost all states practicing some form of climate interventionism to correct markets and addressing the ever deepening social and environmental dislocations this crisis is causing. As Maslin [141] neatly summarises, “Climate change shows a fundamental failure of the market, and it requires governments to act collectively to regulate industry and business”, and that COVID-19 showed “there can be a different relationship between government, industry and civil society… The major lesson from Covid-19 is the failure of free markets to protect us. Instead, state intervention, guided by experts, incorporating and valuing society and communities, underpinned by supportive and dynamic business, to deal with climate change” (pages 149–150). Furthermore, as Stoner [23] contended, “Environmental degradation has not only increased but accelerated throughout the neoliberal period. The persistent failures of market mechanisms, technological optimism, and market-oriented environmental governance expose the inability of neoliberal environmentalism to adequately address our contemporary ecological predicament” (page 492). This study explores the above issues, offering a discursive analysis based on new empirical research to evaluate the extent and nature of neoliberal environmentalism’s influence on the trade-climate nexus, and where evidence exist of a more climate interventionist approach.

5. Research Methodology

To further explore the above discussed issues and subject matter, this study presents new empirical findings based on a research methodology that adopts aspects of grounded theory, discourse analysis and interpretive analytics. It investigates the following hypotheses or research questions. First, to what extent has neoliberal environmentalism thus far dominated mainstream international and global discourses—as exemplified through relevant GEI published works—regarding trade-linked efforts on climate action? Secondly, what have been the principal features of neoliberal environmentalism within these discourses? Thirdly, do the results of the study’s empirical research on the above suggest the need to include other relevant analytical approaches to develop a better comprehension of how trade-climate nexus issues are being addressed at the highest institutional level? To these ends, a text corpus of 37 trade-climate related publications was first created from key works on the subject produced by the most important global economic institutions from 2007 (when GEIs started to publish works in this subject area) to 2022. This included general reports, working papers, official communications, press releases, webpages, communique statements and information briefs (Table 1). Certain shorter publications falling into the same category (e.g., WTO webpages) were consolidated into one publication document, consequently compressing the list into 26 publication text entries.

These selected high-profile GEI publications to a significant extent reflected the official view or approach to trade-climate issues of the institutions. GEIs were chosen as the research focus because they possess very considerable influence in shaping policy practice and goal-setting, especially on global-international matters such as climate action and trade. Not only do their high-profile publications reflect that influence but they also epitomise the dominant or mainstream international and global discourses and perceived ‘conventional wisdom’ to policy-making on such issues [142,143]. This study examines how GEIs have framed trade-climate problems and proposed solutions to them from neoliberal environmentalism perspectives, and where also aspects of climate interventionism are also evident in a states-market relations context. This was conducted through in-depth text analysis research of GEI publications from which key observations and findings were drawn that were further discussed and main conclusions developed.

In the first-stage text analysis, the GEI publication documents were uploaded into NVivo (version 12) software. A series of relevant terms (e.g., concepts, policy measures) were then categorised under each of the four modelled NE normative elements of this study. For example, ‘liberalisation’ under Ideological Principles, Concepts and Theories and ‘carbon taxes’ under Market-Based Instruments. These were then tested in an initial NVivo auto-coding exercise that revealed new relevant terms to add and initial listed terms to remove due to lack of reference in the analysed text corpus. Terms mentioned less than 10 times in the text corpus—which comprised a total of 971 main text pages from across the 37 documents—were omitted. In the second-stage text analysis, each qualifiable term from the revised list were checked for frequency of reference within the text corpus as a proxy significance test.

Table 2. Text Analysis (Second-Stage).

Text Analysis (Second-Stage)—Part A
				1. WTO (2007–2009) 11/11 pgs		2. World Bank (2008) 111/162 pgs		3. UNCTAD (2008) 13/13 pgs		4. WTO-UNEP (2009) 137/194 pgs		5. WEF (2010) 13/20 pgs		6. OECD (2011) 37/42 pgs		7. WTO (2011) 36/45 pgs)		8. OECD (2016) 14/16 pgs		9. OECD (2017) 40/55 pgs		10. OECD (2017) 61/72 pgs		11. UNCTAD (2018) 9/19 pgs		12. WTO-UNEP (2018) 94/107 pgs		13. OECD (2020) 13/20 pgs		14. World Bank (2020) 37/46 pgs
1. Ideological Principles, Concepts and Theories	Total Refs	No. Pubs	Total Ave Ref (p/pg)	Refs	Ave (p/pg)	Refs	Ave (p/pg)	Refs	Ave (p/pg)	Refs	Ave (p/pg)	Refs	Ave (p/pg)	Refs	Ave (p/pg)	Refs	Ave (p/pg)	Refs	Ave (p/pg)	Refs	Ave (p/pg)	Refs	Ave (p/pg)	Refs	Ave (p/pg)	Refs	Ave (p/pg)	Refs	Ave (p/pg)	Refs	Ave (p/pg)
Liberalisation	208	15	0.21			69	0.62			31	0.23			3	0.08			8	0.57	17	0.43	2	0.03	2	0.22					13	0.35
Comparative advantage	101	10	0.10			1	0.01			18	0.13					2	0.06					35	0.57	2	0.22	1	0.01	3	0.23
Trade liberalisation	75	12	0.08			23	0.21			9	0.07			1	0.02			6	0.43	8	0.20	2	0.03							3	0.08
Market access	72	14	0.07							5	0.04					7	0.20			3	0.09					4	0.04			3	0.08
Free trade	60	11	0.06			4	0.04			15	0.11	1	0.08							16	0.40					1	0.01			1	0.02
Trade openness	30	7	0.03			1	0.01			21	0.15															1	0.01
Open trade	27	6	0.03			1	0.01			16	0.12															17	0.17
Market based	26	13	0.03			6	0.05			5	0.04			1	0.03			2	0.14	1	0.03	1	0.02			2	0.02			2	0.05
TOTAL	599	24	0.62
2. Green Growth and Sustainable Development
Sustainable development	202	24	0.21	3	0.27	8	0.07	15	1.15	20	0.15	1	0.08	1	0.03	9	0.20	1	0.07	15	0.38			4	0.44	59	0.59	2	0.15	4	0.11
Economic growth	99	16	0.10			13	0.12	9	0.69	20	0.15							3	0.21			8	0.13			13	0.13			3	0.08
SDGs	63	8	0.06																	3	0.08					31	0.32
Green growth	26	7	0.03																					1	0.11	1	0.01
TOTAL	390	26	0.40
3. Monetarisation and Privatisation of Nature
EGS	186	17	0.19	5	0.45	17	0.15			14	0.10	2	0.15	2	0.05					7	0.18					17	0.18	2	0.15	1	0.03
Environmental services	79	10	0.08			3				2	0.01			3	0.08											3	0.30
Resource efficiency	25	3	0.03																							4	0.04
Ecosystem services	9	6	0.01																							1	0.01
TOTAL	299	19	0.31
4. Market-Based Instruments
FTA/RTAs	395	15	0.41			16	0.15			17	0.12					1	0.03			102	2.55	1	0.02			26	0.28	4	0.30
Carbon taxes	210	12	0.22			88	0.79	1	0.08	58	0.42	4	0.31			4	0.11			1	0.03							5	0.38	14	0.38
Emissions trading	181	13	0.19			19	0.17			103	0.75	1	0.08	6	0.16	13	0.36			9	0.23							4	0.30	6	0.16
Carbon prices	160	13	0.16			2	0.02			37	0.27					3	0.08			11	0.28							21	1.62	4	0.11
Carbon border adjustments	157	11	0.16							1	0.07									6	0.15							16	1.23	53	1.43
Carbon markets	80	13	0.08			1	0.01			4	0.03			10	0.27	10	0.28			19	0.48	1	0.02					1	0.01	4	0.11
(intellectual) Property rights	46	13	0.05			10	0.09			17	0.12	3	0.23	1	0.03	3	0.08			2	0.05			1	0.11	2	0.02
TOTAL	1229	19	1.27
Text Analysis (Second-Stage)—Part B
								15. WTO (2020) 7/10 pgs		16. G7 (2021) 25/25 pgs		17. G20 (2021) 6/6 pgs		18. OECD (2021) 64/80 pgs		19. UNCTAD (2021a) 30/47 pgs		20. UNCTAD (2021b) 46/59 pgs		21. WEF (2021) 24/34 pgs		22. World Bank (2021) 94/141 pgs		23. WTO (2021a) 11/11 pgs		24. WTO (2021b) 8/11 pgs		25. WTO-TESSD(2020-2021) 12/12 pgs		26. WTO (2022) 18/18 pgs
1. Ideological Principles, Concepts and Theories		Total Refs		No. Pubs		Total Ave Ref (p/pg)		Refs	Ave (p/pg)	Refs	Ave (p/pg)	Refs	Ave (p/pg)	Refs	Ave (p/pg)	Refs	Ave (p/pg)	Refs	Ave (p/pg)	Refs	Ave (p/pg)	Refs	Ave (p/pg)	Refs	Ave (p/pg)	Refs	Ave (p/pg)	Refs	Ave (p/pg)	Refs	Ave (p/pg)
Liberalisation		208		15		0.21		1	0.10					9	0.14	6	0.20			7	0.29	30	0.32					7	0.58	3	0.17
Comparative advantage		101		10		0.10												2	0.04			33	0.35							4	0.22
Trade liberalisation		75		12		0.08								6	0.09	1	0.03	1	0.02			12	0.13							3	0.17
Market access		72		14		0.07						1	0.17	9	0.14	6	0.20			4	0.16	10	0.11							7	0.39
Free trade		60		11		0.06								5	0.08	5	0.17			2	0.08	9	0.10							1	0.06
Trade openness		30		7		0.03								1	0.02							6	0.07			1	0.13			1	0.06
Open trade		27		6		0.03				1	0.04									1	0.04									1	0.06
Market based		26		13		0.03		1	0.14	1	0.04			1	0.02	1	0.03					1	0.01							1	0.06
TOTAL		599		24		0.62
2. Green Growth and Sustainable Development
Sustainable development		202		24		0.21		1	0.14	2	0.08	4	0.67	22	0.34	7	0.23	6	0.13	5	0.21	2	0.02	13	1.18			3	0.25	5	0.28
Economic growth		99		16		0.10				2	0.08	1	0.17	6	0.09	2	0.07	8	0.17	1	0.04	7	0.07			1	0.13			2	0.11
SDGs		63		8		0.06		3	0.43	2	0.08	1	0.17	18	0.28							2	0.02					3	0.25
Green growth		26		7		0.03				2	0.08			14	0.22	2	0.07					1	0.01	1	0.10
TOTAL		390		26		0.40
3. Monetarisation and Privatisation of Nature
EGS		186		17		0.19		1	0.14					74	1.16	4	0.13			2	0.08	25	0.27	7	0.63			2	0.17	4	0.22
Environmental services		79		10		0.08								25	0.39	1				4	0.16	28	0.30					4	0.33	6	0.33
Resource efficiency		25		3		0.03				1	0.04			20	0.31
Ecosystem services		9		6		0.01								2	0.03			1	0.02			2		2	0.18			1	0.08
TOTAL		299		19		0.31
4. Market-Based Instruments
FTA/RTAs		395		15		0.41		1	0.14					123	1.92	4	0.12					8	0.08	88	8.00			1	0.08	2	0.12
Carbon taxes		210		12		0.22								4	0.06	3	0.10	5	0.11			22	0.23							1	0.06
Emissions trading		181		13		0.19								2	0.03	6	0.20			5	0.21	6	0.06	1	0.09
Carbon prices		160		13		0.16				2	0.08			14	0.22	26	0.87			17	0.71	19	0.20	3	0.27			1	0.08
Carbon border adjustments		157		11		0.16								2	0.03	22	0.73	6	0.13	17	0.71	24	0.25					4	0.33	6	0.34
Carbon markets		80		13		0.08		1	0.14	1	0.04			12	0.19	15	0.50							1	0.09
(intellectual) Property rights		46		13		0.05		1	0.14			1	0.17	1	0.02							3	0.03							1	0.06
TOTAL		1229		19		1.27

NOTES: Both UK and US English spellings used in word searches, as well we variations of the above terms, e.g., carbon taxes, carbon pricing, border carbon adjustments. First figure in the publication length indicates the number of pages in the publication’s main body of analysis, the second number the publication’s total number of pages, e.g., including contents, etc. No. Pubs—number of publications in which the term is referenced in the text corpus. Refs—references to term listed are highlighted in green to help visual differentiation with blue shade highlighted Ave (p/pg) figures that represent average references per page for each listed term in the publication concerned. Deeper shades of blue indicate progressively higher average figures here, the purpose of this colour highlighting to help visually identify strength of such referencing of key terms.

and Figure 1 provide the data results from this second-stage text analysis exercise, offering linked numeric and graphic forms of communicating these research results based on two frequency scores. The first and most important was average reference frequency per page (‘reference frequency’, under each publication and across the whole text corpus) for each qualifiable term and normative element. The second score was simply how many publications (‘publication frequency’) were covered under each. Key observational findings were made at this level in the text analysis for patterns of normative influence and approach on trade and climate matters. These were more extensively explored in the third-stage text analysis based on an in-depth qualitative analysis of the text, thus different from the more quantitative first-stage and second-stage text analyses. The results from the third-stage analysis derive from a discursive examination of quoted main indicative arguments, conclusions and recommendations that could be drawn from the selected eight most prominent GEI publications using the paper’s modelled NE normative element framework and different earlier covered concepts of state-market relations. This discursive examination of cited material generated more in-depth findings and insights, and from which the core arguments and conclusions of the paper are developed.

6. Text Analysis of GEIs and the Trade-Climate Nexus

6.1. Ideological Principles, Concepts and Theories

First-stage text analysis revealed a relatively long list of relevant NE terms under this normative element but some surprising omissions in the GEI text corpus, e.g., ‘liberalism’, ‘capitalism’, ‘deregulation’ and ‘market system’. ‘Liberal’ was mentioned only three times and ‘free market’ just once. Table 2 shows in the second-stage analysis that only ‘liberalisation’ (0.21 reference frequency) scored quite highly when used exclusively, this being higher still when combined with ‘trade liberalisation’. There was a generally constant pattern of reference frequency under this normative element. While its overall score (0.62) was second-highest, there were relatively low scores for individual terms. Going deeper, third-stage analysis exposed general GEI support for the argument that climate protection was best achieved through trade liberalisation and trade growth. The issue of trade-induced increases in emissions arising from scaled-up production and transportation activity was largely ignored. The World Bank (2008) further asserted that trade liberalisation enables countries’ integration into the world economy, thereby achieving economic growth, development and poverty alleviation, from this drawing the conclusion that, “the broad objectives of the betterment of current and future human welfare are thus shared by both global trade and climate regimes” (page 4). A decade later a joint report published by the 2018 United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) and WTO report [82] claimed scaled-up international trade would release “powerful forces” that, “if properly harnessed, can help make the world economy more sustainable and resilient to environmental and climate risks, while having positive effects on prosperity, jobs and equality” (page 4).

GEIs also stressed how expansion in climate-EGS product trade would achieve environmentally benign changes in the structural composition of both an economy’s trade and production structures, with additional technology transfers benefits accruing especially to lesser-developed economies. For example, the 2020 World Bank report [84] argued that “Removing barriers to trade in products that support moves to a low carbon future, and facilitating knowledge sharing on how to implement the low-carbon transition, can significantly support low- and middle-income countries’ efforts to reduce emissions” (page 25). Another common view was that trade-induced improvements in resource efficiency through comparative advantage-based specialisation would help reduce emissions. Counterviews to this, such as the ‘Jevons Paradox’ argument that efficiency-driven lowering of prices can lead to higher levels of resource-processing and mass-production, are not considered [144]. More broadly, all GEIs underlined the importance of an open and stable global trading system for climate protection. A 2021 World Economic Forum (WEF) report [94] for instance commented that, “a lack of trade policy stability will increase the cost and reduce the pace of investment in decarbonization” (page 4), ‘trade policy stability’ here strongly inferring the WTO-led liberal trade order. Confirming an earlier made point on the relationship between the global trade and climate regimes, there was a general consensus that climate protection measures must uphold and defer to existing WTO rules. Still applying today, the 2008 World Bank report [72] notes that Article XX of GATT/WTO requires any opt-out from these rules on climate action grounds must not in any way “arbitrarily or unjustifiably discriminate between countries where the same conditions prevail, nor constitute a disguised barrier to trade” (page 12). Aside from trade liberalisation, this is the most important trade regulatory issue under this NE normative element.

6.2. Green Growth and Sustainable Development

The auto-coding search conducted in the first-stage analysis of this NE normative element yielded comparatively few terms. Second-stage analysis revealed ‘sustainable development’ (0.21 reference frequency score) as the most prominent term, becoming increasingly applicable to WTO’s trade-climate discourse over time. Reference frequency intensifies after the SDGs framework’s launch in 2015 but the overall score of this normative element is relatively low (0.40) and references to ‘green growth’ (0.03) surprisingly rare, although ‘economic growth’ (0.10) is quite frequently referenced (Table 2). Third-stage analysis reveals that the climate-benign scaling up of trade discussed previously is generally coupled with sustainable development and green growth in core GEI publications. The 2021 World Bank report [92] on trade, climate change and developing countries deploys the environmental Kuznets curve (EKC) argument that trade-driven growth and development will eventually lower GHG emissions. This is a somewhat controversial green growth concept that is not treated at all critically here. Its EKC-based claim that, “environmental degradation occurs with increasing economic growth until the country attains middle-income status, after which the environmental impacts start to decline” [92], page 29 is partly premised on earlier discussed trade composition arguments.

The 2009 WTO-UNEP report [82] meanwhile proposed that, “Trade and climate policies must be coherent and aligned with the overarching principle of sustainable development to avoid undermining each other” (page 43). From a similar green growth perspective, the World Bank’s [92] analysis of the trade-climate nexus is based on its ‘GRID’ (green, resilient, and inclusive development) formula, citing that, “An increasing body of analysis shows that low-carbon and climate-resilient growth can provide poverty reduction and human development outcomes superior to the current alternative… in which trade must play a key role” (page 17). Little evidence of climate interventionism was found from this NE normative element perspective in the GEI text corpus. While the 2021 World Bank report [92] later states that, “trade policy has the tools needed to shift an economy toward green growth” (page 26), this was to be simply achieved by tariff-restructuring where higher import duties should be applied on emission-intensive products (a rare advocacy of Polanyian countermovement ‘non-liberalisation’ on this matter) and lowered in high-technology green sectors.

6.3. Monetarisation and Privatisation of Nature

The auto-coding search of the text corpus here too generated very few qualifiable terms under this NE normative element. ‘Monetarisation’ and ‘privatisation’ themselves (including derivative variations of them) scored no references and ‘environmental resources’ only three. Environmental services (0.08), resource efficiency (0.03) and eco-system services (0.01) were all low scoring. The most significant outcome from the text analysis was that the most prominent qualifiable term—environmental goods and services, or EGS (0.19 score)—is discussed almost exclusively in trade liberalisation and market creation contexts. As explained earlier, EGS tend to be more technology-based products—especially their climate-EGS variant—rather than ‘natural’ environmental resources based. While this narrows the scope for discussing these as overtly monetarised commodities, they are still often viewed in tradeable commodity contexts where trade liberalisation spurs their expanded production and export, and lowers their prices [72,74].

Nevertheless, this is the weakest normative element with just a 0.31 overall reference frequency score (Table 2, Figure 1). If the study’s subject matter concerned trade in biological matter such as plant-life or animal/marine species then we may predict with some certainty the results would be markedly different. Staying with EGS for the moment there is evidence of climate interventionism discussed here from this normative element perspective. The 2020 World Bank report [84] suggests that states and other institutions could provide “trade-related technical assistance to support less-developed countries (LDCs) in addressing supply-side and behind the border constraints so as to be able to benefit from liberalisation of environmentally preferable products” (page 36). It could be reasoned that the ‘technical assistance’ interventions advocated here are more likely to refer to state capacity-building and regulatory measures rather than more overtly neoliberal-oriented policies such as deregulation. While the prime objective remains the liberalisation of climate-EGS products trade, the 2020 World Bank [84] recommended the need for low-income countries to be given assistance to go “deeper into the agenda of regulatory development and convergence” (page 36) such as the use of carbon-accounting methodologies and GHG protocol standards to help facilitate their trade in climate-EGS products. Similar conclusions were made by the 2021 OECD report [88] regarding the positive role state’s environmental regulation can play in facilitating EGS trade. Different aspects of state-market relations can be seen here such as the regulatory state approach and inferences of the competitive state model on state actions to improve trade competitiveness. Overall, though, the influence of neoliberal environmentalism appears to be relatively strong regarding this normative element albeit quite narrowly focused.

6.4. Market-Based Instruments (MBIs)

This was by far the most salient NE normative element (1.27 reference frequency overall) with numerous qualifiable terms arising in the first-stage text analysis. The highest ranked term overall was FTA/RTAs (0.41), although its prominence owed much to high reference frequency in just three GEI publications. While FTA/RTAs promote trade liberalisation and mutual market access between signatory trade partners, they are increasingly viewed as trade regulatory treaties entailing inter-governmental co-operation on market rule-setting and market creation. Their climate-relevant provisions furthermore have a strong focus on inter-governmental and multilateral co-operation rather than liberalisation per se [68,144]. Other prominent MBI-related terms included carbon taxes (0.22), emissions trading (0.19), carbon border adjustments (0.16) and carbon pricing (0.16). MBIs have been a leading normative element in the trade-climate nexus from their beginning and have become stronger over time (Table 2, Figure 1).

Deeper third-stage analysis of the text corpus generated important findings and raised key issues for discussion on neoliberal environmentalism and climate interventionism. Early GEI publications called for co-ordinated international action on trade-climate MBIs. The 2008 World Bank report [72] proposed a multilateral agreement on a uniform approach to carbon pricing. Soon after, the 2009 WTO-UNEP report [74] suggested a similar pact on hypothecating revenue produced from carbon border adjustments and international emission trading schemes to fund programmes supporting the transition to decarbonised production and trade. Sometime later the 2021 WEF report [91] highlighted the importance of MBIs and other state policy measures in facilitating decarbonisation in global supply chain trade, this involving some level of co-ordinated inter-governmental trade and climate regulatory action. Its main findings derived from interviews conducted with its business members worldwide, among which there was a clear support for governments and international institutions to introduce more active carbon pricing interventions and a “range of other tools, such as sustainability standards, border adjustment mechanisms, “carbon clubs”, carbon-linked tariffs for emissions-intensive sectors such as steel, internal carbon-pricing schemes, green procurement and sustainability-linked finance… acting as carbon-price proxies” (page 18). The lack of technical regulations or those that differed from international standards were cited by both the 2009 WTO-UNEP and 2021 OECD reports [74,88] as more important than non-tariff measures hindering trade in climate-EGS products. Similar findings arose in the 2021 WEF report’s [91] own survey research suggesting that a lack of international standard alignment has constrained climate-EGS product trade more than unliberalised international markets with high tariffs. In sum, then, stronger regulatory state action and interventions were primarily required in these areas.

The most interesting and contentious issues on state-market relations and the trade-climate nexus arise among GEIs in the normative element. The 2009 WTO-UNEP report [74] acknowledges the positive role government interventions can play in promoting decarbonisation but also how these can have market and trade distorting effects. It nevertheless acknowledges that, “although the private sector plays the major role in the development and diffusion of technology, it is generally considered that closer collaboration between government and industry can further stimulate the development of a broad portfolio of low-carbon technologies and reduce their costs.” (page xx). Here, it distinguished between what were conceived as good state interventions (e.g., carbon pricing, joint research and development efforts) and bad ones. An example of the latter was subsidised support of climate-friendly products specifically for export, viewed as both market distortion and unfair competition and thus contravening WTO rules embodied in the Subsidies and Countervailing Measures Agreement.

The 2021 OECD report [88] meanwhile offered a dualistic view on certain climate interventionist measures, noting their positive effects on scaling up renewable energy technologies and industry but, “where these same measures are trade restrictive, they can have the opposite effect on renewable uptake because they tend to push up overall costs” (page 41), referring to domestic-level policies with indirect impacts on trade flows. The 2021 World Bank report [84] proposed that all government subsidies were market distorting per se and championed the use of international standards and labelling schemes to signal to the market the carbon content of internationally traded products. However, in some contrast the 2021 WEF report [91] conveyed the reasonably strong support among its surveyed international business community for more state subsidy support for developing frontier technologies such as green hydrogen and expanding trade in these sectors, thus aligned more with a (positive externality) market failure approach than the ‘market distortion’ position. This view was also evident in the 2021 United Nations Conference on Trade and Development’s (UNCTAD) report [89] that examined a range of climate action ‘response measures’ (a UNFCCC term) in a trade context. It identified carbon border adjustments as the most controversial trade-climate MBI owing to their association with ‘green protectionism’ but adopted a generally neutral view towards them despite acknowledging their potential to conflict with both WTO and UNFCCC regimes.

A core idea championed in the 2021 UNCTAD report [89] was that “making trade and trade policy an integral part of sustainability transitions would require a change in mindset from market access to market creation” (page 23). It advocated a role for governments and international institutions to help create and expand markets through a combination of MBIs, other regulatory measures, collaboration with business and funding support. It generally argued that most markets for climate-friendly and other EGS products were not yet sufficiently robust to justify trade-climate policies solely based on promoting market access through trade liberalisation. Running counter to the pro-liberalisation views of other GEIs covered under other NE normative elements, the 2021 UNCTAD report [89] stated this was mainly due to a lack or uneven patterns of international competition. Instead, a ‘market creation’ approach focused on capacity-building programmes funded by governments and international institutions (e.g., through development assistance) would develop a stronger trade competitive dynamic and more effectively facilitate climate technology transfers, the competition state approach being relevant here from a climate interventionist perspective.

For UNCTAD [89], it was not a question of climate protection being best served by a pro- or anti- free trade position, rather designing the most effective trade regulations. Recommending various changes to the ‘trade rulebook’ on climate and environmental issues generally, UNCTAD was essentially advocating broad re-regulation that included amending certain WTO rules still upheld by more neoliberal-oriented GEIs. For example, in relation to Article XX, the 2021 UNCTAD report advised that subsidies be evaluated based on both their climate and economic impacts, and that global trade rules on carbon border adjustments be developed. Additionally, anti-dumping duties could be adjusted to account for their negative or positive GHG emissions impact effects, e.g., on steel and solar panels, respectively. In the wake of the COVID-19 crisis, it observed that countries were again resorting to subsidy and other Polanyian ‘countermovement’ policy interventions to support a green recovery, including trade-climate measures in a ‘build back better’ context, and that: “from a global standpoint, subsidies are preferable to tariffs. The former expands the global supply of clean technologies while the latter restricts it” [89], page 31). The report further noted governments were adopting a more ‘managed trade’ approach through (mainly bilateral) FTA/RTAs whose climate-relevant provisions were becoming more prevalent, these involving a combination of inter-governmental co-operation on market regulation and creation, industry and technical support and new climate technology development.

7. Discussion and Main Conclusions

This paper has conducted an in-depth, multi-stage text analysis of mainstream international and global discourses on neoliberal environmentalism and the trade-climate nexus. A text corpus of relevant global economic institutions (GEI) publications on the subject matter spanning the 2007–2022 period has provided the empirical basis for this research. While the 37 publications examined comprised a very good workable sample of documentary evidence, this paper was limited to those published by GEIs. Future research in this area could include national government publications on the subject matter produced by major trading nations such as the United States, China, Germany and Japan. To begin with addressing the study’s first two hypotheses or research questions outlined earlier, the text analysis of GEI publications confirmed overall that neoliberal environmentalism is significantly evident in mainstream international and global discourses on the trade-climate nexus, especially from the perspective of the first three modelled normative elements. Despite not having the highest reference frequency score, the qualitative impact of the Ideological Principles, Concepts and Theories element was found to be notable. Here, GEI publications barely deviated from the neoliberal environmentalism orthodoxy view that trade liberalisation and trade growth were key to securing climate protection, based primarily on comparative advantage trade specialisation delivering resource efficiency outcomes. Additionally, promoting the expansion of climate-EGS products trade would create more environmentally benign production structures and expand clean technology transfers. Overall, the climate impacts of trade liberalisation and trade growth were treated uncritically while the primacy of the WTO liberal trade regime over its climate equivalent was clearly affirmed.

Strong links were shown to exist between this first normative element and that of Green Growth and Sustainable Development, trade (and export-based industrialisation particularly) being long viewed by GEIs as strong dependable drivers of economic growth. Sustainable development has gradually become the more prominent concept in their trade-climate publications but where greater emphasis on growth-oriented development than sustainability is evident. In sum, there was general GEI support for trade advancing ‘green’ capitalist accumulation. The Monetarisation and Privatisation of Nature normative element was notably the weakest. This owed much to its own prominent concept of environmental goods and services (EGS)—and especially its climate-EGS variant—being intrinsically more technology-based as opposed to natural or environmental resources based. Thus, the ‘neoliberalism of nature’ aspect of NE was found to be less relevant to the trade-climate nexus compared to other environmental issues.

Various aspects and issues of climate interventionism arose, however, under the Market-Based Instruments (MBIs) normative element, and this is where the main conclusions on the study’s third hypothesis or research question are presented. GEI publications on the trade-climate nexus discussed a wide range of state intervention measures deployed to essentially correct market failure, strengthen climate protection and institutionalise market order through regulation generally, as well as foster international trade co-operative interventions on climate action for example through FTA/RTAs. The study’s text analysis also revealed MBIs as by far the strongest normative element of the four (Table 2, Figure 1), providing further rationale for incorporating state-market relations into the discussion. While some MBIs were viewed negatively in certain GEI critical evaluations, many MBIs were viewed positively. This was set largely in a Polanyian double-movement context in which advocated state policies involved both facilitating new forms of marketisation (e.g., creating trade-linked, internationalised carbon markets) while in parallel introducing new ‘countermovement’ climate protection measures (e.g., carbon pricing, carbon border adjustments) to manage market externality effects.

It was also shown that GEI critical evaluations of MBIs could be dualistic. Trade-climate policy measures such as carbon border adjustments may be simultaneously conceived as addressing market failure—and thus in Polanyian countermovement socio-environmental protection terms—or as market distorting by such taxes raising the transaction costs of internationally traded goods. Either way, one could conclude that such cases of climate interventionism notably deviate from the more purist forms of neoliberal environmentalism based on a non-interfering state in the market. The Polanyian approach to state-market relations was arguably the most relevant and useful but other models were also applicable. For example, the regulatory state in connection with international trade-climate standards and the competition state regarding a market creation approach on trade capacity-building, although this played also to the trade-driven green growth discourse of neoliberal environmentalism under earlier covered normative elements.

In discussing the prominence of the MBI normative element it was further argued that even more neoliberal aligned governments may adopt a more interventionist approach on climate change given it is a complex ‘long crisis’ that poses a serious existential threat to all humanity. MBIs provide the natural option for such states, with some perceived more aligned with the normative fundamentals of neoliberal environmentalism, such as internationalised emissions trading. Establishing which particular MBIs may be considered more climate interventionist than others is ultimately a matter of debate and interpretation. This study has explored through new research and conceptualisation the grounds for understanding how more regulatory proactive states may engage with trade-climate challenges, this contrasting with the passive non-intervening state normally associated with neoliberal environmentalism.

The main contribution of this paper has been to open up ideas and debate concerning how important aspects of neoliberal environmentalism overlap with, and can be better understood in the context of state-market relations. Evidence from this study’s research suggests that in the trade-climate nexus discourse there exists considerable space for states and international institutions to adopt, promote and innovate different forms of climate interventionism through various trade policy and governance actions. This is indicative of a lack of neoliberal faith in self-regulating markets alone to deal with the critical ‘long crisis’ of climate change, which will require increasingly substantive Polanyian countermovement socio-environmental protection measures to address it. In this regard, this paper explored through new research and conceptualisation how variations in types and levels of climate interventionism can exist. This includes deeper state involvement in institutionalising market orders through, for example, new forms of trade-climate policy innovation as well as market-correcting regulation and standards-forming actions. More broadly, it considers how more proactive states may engage with trade-climate challenges, this contrasting with the passive non-intervening state normally associated with neoliberal environmentalism.

In final conclusion it should be acknowledged that many aspects of climate interventionism may still be compliant with neoliberal environmentalism’s championing of green growthism, capitalist accumulation and fundamentally unreconstructed capitalism generally. Climate change is a crisis of such significant magnitude that it cannot and should not be left mainly to free self-regulating markets to resolve it. Neoliberal approaches have clearly failed us. More radical structural change and transformative actions are needed both now and over the long term. MBI-based trade-related policies can only take us so far in climate action efforts, including the elimination of carbon and other GHG emissions. More ardent forms of state and other institutional interventions, from the local to the global-international levels, are required to ultimately achieve that aim and other increasingly urgent climate goals.