How to Respond to Un Governance Failures? Lessons from Europe’s Economic and Environmental Constitutionalism

How should citizens respond to UN governance failures with respect to preventing climate change, wars of aggression, global health pandemics, and violations of human rights like access to food and public health protection? Europe’s multilevel constitutionalism has enabled the European Union (EU) to exercise a leadership role for realizing the universally agreed “sustainable development goals” (SDGs), including in the external relations of the EU. But democratic constitutionalism – as a political and legal strategy for protecting rights of citizens and supporting rules-based, democratic governance – remains contested by governments prioritizing authoritarian and neo-liberal policies. As an analytical research method, constitutionalism explains “market failures”, “governance failures” and “constitutional failures” – as well as related remedies – more convincingly than alternative methods like “realism” and “welfare economics”. The more power politics impedes UN and WTO reforms, the more necessary become second-best plurilateral governance reforms which make membership conditional on promoting human rights and rules-based, multilevel private-public partnerships for realizing the SDGs. Europe’s economic and “environmental constitutionalism” illustrates how constitutionalism can also facilitate sustainable development reforms in the UN, WTO and the plurilateral governance of global public goods, like climate change mitigation and transnational rule-of-law.