The EU governs beyond borders to avoid environmental burden shifting

Economic globalization has increased the speed, volume and geographical scope of trade flows. People, products and ideas can reach around the world farther, faster and cheaper than ever before. While increased trade of goods has stimulated economic growth and increased economic prosperity in many parts of the world, it has also enabled the displacement of environmental burdens from places of consumption to distant places of production. Despite the growing scientific and societal recognition that many countries, mainly from the Global North, exert pressure on natural resources beyond their own borders through international trade, we still lack a comprehensive understanding on how public governance can address this environmental burden shifting. In this paper we analyse this problem and emerging solutions from the vantage point of the European Union (EU). We start by defining the problem, which is a misfit between the scale of classical territorial public environmental governance and the scale of today’s sustainability problems that transcend jurisdictional boundaries. Since the EU cannot enforce environmental standards in other countries, transnational governance initiatives like voluntary certification schemes have emerged to fill this gap. Yet, despite the seemingly strong role of non-state actors in trying to mitigate the socio-ecological impacts of imported commodities, the EU is also increasingly developing public governance approaches to prevent the displacement of its environmental footprint to other countries. We pinpoint the various ways in which the EU is governing its extra-territorial footprint and argue that it is time to bring the state back in – both in environmental governance beyond borders and the academic discussion thereof.