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The article examines the way in which environmental issues are testing the World Trade Organization (WTO). The analysis refers to global political economy, and to ecological economics. The first section deals with the handling of the environment. The second is devoted to the ecological critique, and appraises its main proposals. Three particular points are made: (1) The environment did not appear on the agenda of the Uruguay Round. Today, however, the WTO can no longer disregard it: the ecological critique has transformed the debate by introducing the physical limits of the biosphere and the dominance of politics in the organisation of trade. (2) The WTO Secretariat is now prepared to debate the substance of the ecological critique; it recognises that trade policy is situated in a limitless field of contestability, in particular concerning the status of free trade and balanced, safe and fair trade. (3) Yet the WTO confines itself to applying exogenous standards in settling environment—related trade disputes. These standards are set by multilateral agreements in varied configuration and by international institutions of hybrid status. The transfers of authority implied by the use of such exogenous standards have now become a crucial issue in the global political economy of trade and the environment.

The article examines the way in which environmental issues are testing the World Trade Organization (WTO). The analysis refers to global political economy, & to ecological economics. The first section deals with the handling of the environment. The second is devoted to the ecological critique, & appraises its main proposals. Three particular points are made: (1) The environment did not appear on the agenda of the Uruguay Round. Today, however, the WTO can no longer disregard it: the ecological critique has transformed the debate by introducing the physical limits of the biosphere & the dominance of politics in the organization of trade. (2) The WTO Secretariat is now prepared to debate the substance of the ecological critique; it recognizes that trade policy is situated in a limitless field of contestability, in particular concerning the status of free trade & balanced, safe & fair trade. (3) Yet the WTO confines itself to applying exogenous standards in settling environment-related trade disputes. These standards are set by multilateral agreements in varied configuration & by international institutions of hybrid status. The transfers of authority implied by the use of such exogenous standards have now become a crucial issue in the global political economy of trade & the environment. 1 Figure, 1 Picture, 30 References. Adapted from the source document.

This paper asks whether collective industrial relations can be promoted by means other than seeking change in public policy. Recent research points to the increasing significance of transnational private regulation (TPR) in developing economies. There is an emerging consensus that market incentives to improve wages and conditions of work can have a modest positive effect on measurable outcomes like hours of work, and health and safety. However, it appears that TPR has little impact on the capacity of workers to pursue such improvements for themselves via collective action. The paper takes a closer look at the potential of TPR to enhance worker voice and participation. It argues that this potential cannot be properly evaluated without understanding how local actors mobilise the social and political resources that TPR provides. The case studies presented show how different TPR schemes have been used by unions in Africa as a means to pursue the interests of members. The authors found that the scale of the impact of TPR in all of the contexts studied depended almost entirely on the existing capacities and resources of the unions involved. TPR led to the creation of collective industrial relations processes, or helped unions to ensure that certain enterprises participated in existing industrial relations processes, but did virtually nothing to enhance the political and organisational capacity of the unions to influence the outcomes of those processes in terms of wages and conditions of employment. The paper concludes that the potential of TPR to promote the emergence of collective industrial relations systems is very low.

This forum opens a debate that is long overdue: for far too long, the fields of international political sociology (IPS) and international political economy (IPE) have been standing apart. Discussions take place in different conference sections, in different networks that publish in different journals. Yet, this divide is surprising given that the two fields share similar trajectories, theoretical concerns, problématiques, and conceptual challenges. This forum starts exploring this shared terrain: we believe that there is no a priori reason to separate the sociocultural, the political and the economic when we aim at making sense of the world in any meaningful way. We propose that bridging the IPE-IPS divide has tremendous potential for the development of a socio-political economy analysis that, we believe, has two benefits. First, it allows for the opening of new empirical terrains or deepening and widening existing ones. Second, bringing IPE/S back together creates reflexive spaces for more holistic, embodied and contextualised conceptual innovation. The contributors to this forum show each in their own way such empirical and conceptual added value of moving beyond the IPE and IPS divide in order to develop what we call here a socio-political economy of the globe. They focus on various issues, such as the transformation of capitalism from an oil- to a data-dependent accumulation regime with the rising of the so-called 'digital age' (Chenou); the profound social, economic and political transformation triggered by urbanisation in the development world (Elias, Rethel and Tilley); emerging global risks and the neglected role of the insurance industry (Lobo-Guerrero); regional development-security nexuses (Lopez Lucia); and business power in climate change diplomacy (Moussu).

This forum opens a debate that is long overdue: for far too long, the fields of international political sociology (IPS) and international political economy (IPE) have been standing apart. Discussions take place in different conference sections, in different networks that publish in different journals. Yet, this divide is surprising given that the two fields share similar trajectories, theoretical concerns, problématiques, and conceptual challenges. This forum starts exploring this shared terrain: we believe that there is no a priori reason to separate the sociocultural, the political and the economic when we aim at making sense of the world in any meaningful way. We propose that bridging the IPE-IPS divide has tremendous potential for the development of a socio-political economy analysis that, we believe, has two benefits. First, it allows for the opening of new empirical terrains or deepening and widening existing ones. Second, bringing IPE/S back together creates reflexive spaces for more holistic, embodied and contextualised conceptual innovation. The contributors to this forum show each in their own way such empirical and conceptual added value of moving beyond the IPE and IPS divide in order to develop what we call here a socio-political economy of the globe. They focus on various issues, such as the transformation of capitalism from an oil- to a data-dependent accumulation regime with the rising of the so-called 'digital age' (Chenou); the profound social, economic and political transformation triggered by urbanisation in the development world (Elias, Rethel and Tilley); emerging global risks and the neglected role of the insurance industry (Lobo-Guerrero); regional development-security nexuses (Lopez Lucia); and business power in climate change diplomacy (Moussu).

Little consensus exists about the efectiveness of transnational private governance in domains such as labor, the environment, or human rights. The paper builds on recent scholarship on labor standards to emphasize the role of labor agency in transnational private governance. It argues that the relationship between transnational private regulatory initiatives and labor agency depends on three competences: irst, the ability of workers' organizations to gain access to processes of employment regulation, implementation, and monitoring; second, their ability to insist on the inclusion of employers and state agencies within such processes; and third, the ability of workers to efectively exercise leverage in pursuit of particular goals. The paper develops a framework, called hybrid production regime, for examining how workers' capacity to act at the local level depends on how these three collective competences are addressed in the institutionalization of capital–labor relations between the transnational and national levels.

The paper argues that by combining ecological economics, IPE and regulation approaches more closely, one may provide an account of the apparent contradiction between the utopian aspect of sustainable development and the ability of capitalism to pragmatically deal with ecological crises. It explores how ensuing institutional forms inevitably take sustainability claims into account. It assumes that such forms revolve around the emergence of a new type of evolutionary environmental regulation whose coherence is paradoxically at once open-ended, fragmented and hybrid. This feature clearly reinforces the extreme difficulty in thinking about ecological regularities. The paper analyses core elements of such institutional forms and how far they can be identified as a new type of fragmented evolutionary environmental regulation. Section 1 provides background on the notion of sustainable development. Sections 2 examines the prospects and limits of regulation theory on global ecological issues and presents lessons could be drawn from ecological economics and international political economy approaches for opening new routes to appraise current and future environmental concerns of capitalism. Section 3 explores the emerging form of evolutionary environmental regulation reflecting the apparently paradoxical situation we have reached, in which disillusion regarding sustainable development goes hand in hand with increasing awareness of the inescapability of a policy shift in its favour.