The present research project responds to concerns about patterns of injustice that permeate practices of global climate politics and how those practices are enabled and constrained by international law. It employs a historical perspective to chart the role of international law as the climate crisis emerged, both in the ways in which the law has been deeply complicit in the problem, and how it may also be part of a solution. The project focuses on the positioning of the state and on the law of the global economy.

The emergence of emission trading provides another focal point that may serve as an example: in the leadup to the 1997 Kyoto Protocol, the European Commission and several Member States resisted the nascent idea of emission trading—the trading either of emission allowances or of carbon credits. They did so with a variety of reasons, including moral ones that likened emission trading to the idea of trade in indulgences. In little time, however, the consensus among key European actors flipped. They turned out to not only embrace the creation of an international emission market under the Kyoto Protocol, but then also pioneered the European Emission Trading System (ETS)—the first, largest and still most ambitious of the about 30 ETS that now exist globally.

This was a pivotal moment: how did that change happen? What were the main arguments and who were the main actors driving this development? It is fairly well-known that in the US, market-based mechanisms in environmental policy were already on the rise to replace traditional command-and-control policies. In tune with the changing zeitgeist of the 1980s, those market-based mechanisms were increasingly employed to incentivize economic actors through price signals. But what was the source and potential of initial European resistance? Why and how did it crumble?