The environmental effects and effectiveness of trade agreements - Insights from EU ex-post evaluations

Since the early 1990s, EU trade agreements have increasingly included environmental provisions, but their external effects remain debated. While the European literature on Trade and Sustainable Development chapters tends to be pessimistic about external effects, research comparing trade agreements with and without environmental provisions finds positive effects. Much seems to depend on the respective context and the underlying understanding of environmental effectiveness. This study systematizes existing conceptualizations of EU, external and environmental effectiveness and analyses a recently upscaled EU policy instrument – ex-post evaluations of trade agreements. How effective are EU trade agreements according to these impact assessments from the viewpoint of the European Commission? Due to the high contextual heterogeneity, I propose a broad typology of environmental effects of EU trade agreements including political, legal, economic and ecological effects and compare the effects identified in the ex-post evaluations against four different reference points, ambition, compliance, behaviour and problem-solving. The ex-post evaluations are then qualitatively coded along these dimensions. The preliminary results indicate that ex-post evaluations diverge in the effects they assess, as well as their findings. However, they indicate an improvement in the environmental effects of EU trade agreements over time. Although economic effects are generally mixed and ecological effects mostly negative, political and legal effects are increasingly positive. I discuss the politics of the ex-post evaluations and possible implications for further research. The results are of interest for the literature on EU external governance, environmental effectiveness, and postcolonial studies.