The Design of Environmental Impact Assessments of Trade Agreements -- Insights from a New Dataset

Environmental impact assessments (EIAs) are increasingly applied in the context of trade agreements, but empirical research on their institutional design is scarce. Trade actors were early called to conduct EIAs of trade agreements: The OECD Ministerial Council recommended in 1993 that "governments should examine or review trade and environmental policies and agreements with potentially significant effects on the other policy area". In 2017, the United Nations Environmental Programme and the International Institute for Sustainable Development developed recommendations for conducting an EIA of trade agreements, concerning the timing, the geographical and thematic scope, and the nature of the assessor. Surprisingly, there is, so far, no systematic assessment of how trade actors conduct EIAs of trade agreements and to what extent current practices in EIAs of trade agreements are in line with these recommendations. This study investigates the institutional design of EIAs of trade agreements. How are environmental impact assessments of trade agreements conducted? To this end, we construct a novel dataset on the environmental impact assessment of trade agreements (DEIATA) based on an exhaustive survey of the environmental impact assessment of trade agreements. For preferential trade agreements notified at the WTO, we collected information concerning the treaties for which an EIA was done, when in the decision process of the treaty the EIA was done, the scope of the EIA and the method that was used. The dataset on the environmental impact assessment of trade agreements (DEIATA) provides systematic information concerning timing, assessment method, scope, and actor for 124 trade agreements of which the EIA is publicly available. In this way, DEIATA provides a means to evaluate the evolution and structure of these assessments over time. We illustrate the usefulness of this novel dataset by analyzing the EU’s regulatory approach to EIAs of trade agreements in a comparative perspective with other trade actors conducting similar assessments of trade agreements. Our findings indicate that institutional design of EIAs varies significantly – depending on the actors involved. In most cases, EIAs are conducted exclusively ex ante and focus on the domestic impact. Ex post assessments are much less frequent. The EU seems to be leading the international field with most EIAs conducted, engaging independent consultants, and conducting reviews for both parties involved. However, current practices of trade agreements are still rather far from UNEP recommendations, particularly concerning the impact on third parties, the assessment of ex-post analyses, and standard indicators of environmental impacts. The dataset on the design of EIAs of trade agreements that we build allows longitudinal and comparative insights on how and to what extent environmental risks have been incorporated into bilateral and regional trade policy. Here we use it to put the EU’s approach to environmental risk and impact assessment of trade agreements in a comparative perspective but the dataset will also be useful for the broader academic and political debates on the politics of institutional design of trade agreements, the compatibility of trade and environmental policy as well as environmental impact assessments and risk regulation in a general context.