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The book studies emergence and consolidation of voluntary sustainability standards (VSS); private standards defining sustainability-related product features. The book takes stock of their success and their potential in mediating between economic and non-economic concerns of global production. Despite their private and voluntary nature, VSS generate profound consequences for the producers seeking certification, for the consumers purchasing certified products, and for others affected by their standards. VSS are used by public authorities in the EU as a functional complement to public measures regulating global value chains. At this juncture of market proliferation and public use of private regimes, this book studies how public authority can control, coordinate and review VSS. It studies how the regulation of VSS could unfold through substantive and procedural legal requirements in the domain of European Union law and World Trade Organisation law, as well as through the incentives offered by VSS employment in public measures.
The introduction presents the subject matter of the book, the structure of the volume, and the questions it attempts to answer. Among these questions, the book investigates the relation and extent of complementarity between VSS and international law rules in the social and environmental domains, as well as trade. It aims to understand the modalities of public use of VSS in market regulation, their complementarity with EU rules and their implications. The book then studies how EU internal market and WTO legal regimes can control, coordinate and review VSS. In particular it proposes a possible interpretation of EU and WTO legal rules and meta-rules, in view of addressing the trade barrier effects of VSS and to possibly scale-up their effectiveness.