Journal of World Trade
Volume 57, Issue 3 (2023) pp. 505 – 530

https://doi.org/10.54648/trad2023017

Abstract

The evolution of labour and environmental norms in the global trading system has been full of fits and starts but were formally linked together in side-agreements to the 1994 North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). The NAFTA’s evolution complicates reading of literatures devoted to the evolution of norms. This paper traces and compares the uneven trajectory of labour and environmental norms in North America through the renegotiation of the NAFTA 2017– 2019. The paper takes issue with norms scholarship as cast against the NAFTA. Whereas norms scholarship generally posits a liberalizing, progressive trajectory for norm evolution, focused mainly on their mobilization by non-state actors, that literature has hitherto been less able to account for more traditional accounts of norms being weaponized for illiberal, protectionist purposes now embodied in the renegotiated NAFTA.

Extract

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