Regulating from upstream: Sustainability law in the Asia‐Pacific

Abstract What is ‘sustainability law’ in the Asia‐Pacific? The term now encompasses fields as varied as biodiversity governance, Indigenous knowledge protection, trade disputes, supply chain regulation, financial disclosure and digital traceability. Existing scholarship has traced the rise of these dispersed regulatory techniques, but less attention has been paid to their cumulative effect on how legal authority is organised across the region. This editorial argues that sustainability law is emerging not primarily as a new body of environmental doctrine but as a shift in how environmental objectives are pursued through law. Law increasingly operates upstream, embedding environmental objectives within the regimes that structure trade, finance, markets and information flows. In doing so, it reshapes where regulatory authority is exercised, how responsibility is distributed and which forms of knowledge acquire regulatory force. The contributions to this Special Issue examine how these dynamics unfold across the Asia‐Pacific. They show that the distinctiveness of sustainability law lies not in the proliferation of new environmental rules, but in the sites and legal frameworks through which environmental outcomes are shaped before environmental law is formally engaged.