The foreign spillovers of hybrid trade-based climate governance

Abstract Countries often adopt climate mitigation policies that generate extraterritorial effects through trade. These measures can interact with existing private governance tools, such as voluntary sustainability standards (VSS). We call this hybrid trade-based climate governance. This article aims to examine how the EU designed the hybrid trade-based climate governance in the biofuels sector, and to begin evaluating its spillover effects in third countries. We do so by revisiting the political process behind the EU’s renewable energy directive (EU RED) and by probing its impacts in Brazil through Bonsucro. Using process tracing, we indicate that the European Commission avoided including socioeconomic criteria in the assessment of its biofuels regulation. Quantitative analysis, in turn, suggests that the EU’s orchestration of VSS is associated with mixed effects on the ground in Brazil. The EU biofuels governance may be ill-suited to help promote climate justice abroad due to its excessive focus on procedures rather than fair impacts. While this is an initial, tentative analysis, the results nonetheless reinforce the need for a more careful discussion of alternative approaches to VSS orchestration.