This chapter situates the emergence of marketised global justice in the 1990s. The period between the end of the Cold War and the beginning of the new millennium gave rise to new conceptions of branding as well as a new anti-impunity movement. To date, these phenomena have been treated as entirely separate, but this chapter suggests that the connection between them is key for understanding the marketisation of global justice – and the consolidation of the neoliberal order more broadly. In the 1990s, branding turned to branding lifestyle rather than branding products, and moved outside of the commercial space. At the same time, international law partly reimagined itself as the discipline of ‘new interventionism’, the discipline of the institutionalisation of an international economic order, and a new regime of individual criminal accountability. As these new conceptualisations of marketing and international law fused, they created an alliance in marketised global justice.

The Trump administration’s multi-front trade war dramatically escalated with the imposition of extraordinary tariffs on Chinese imports in 2018. Corporate America has responded with a concerted campaign of resistance. We document these efforts – through extensive participation in notice and comment and public coalition-building – and show that corporate opposition to the trade war is primarily a consequence of firms' sourcing and production linkages with China. In contrast, we find far weaker efforts by anti-trade firms to support the trade war, whether to insulate themselves from import competition or to confront Chinese trade practices. We therefore describe and empirically illustrate the politics of global production networks, and highlight that scholars of trade politics should not neglect opposition to the Trump trade agenda arising from globally integrated firms. Global order in the area of trade hangs in the balance in an ongoing fight between corporate globalism and populist nationalism.

The chapter opens with the historic decision by the Philippines Human Rights Commission that carbon-major companies can be liable for climate-induced harms. While this decision has no direct legal impact on companies, it illustrates the ever closer connection between human rights and climate impacts. The chapter assesses the transnational business and human rights landscape, primarily through an assessment of the UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights and illustrated by a recent dispute mediated by the Dutch National Contact Point under the OECD Guidelines on the climate impacts of ING’s lending practices. It charts the two waves of climate-based litigation against states and companies, with a focus on cases in the United States, The Netherlands, and Pakistan and two recent UK cases. The chapter provides an assessment of the direct overlap between human rights and climate litigation with the RWE v Lliuya case and the Philippines Human Rights Commission’s investigation of carbon-majors. The chapter closes with a look at the potential crystallisation of corporate climate obligations in the future through the Principles of Climate Obligations of Enterprises and the barrier that separate legal personality poses within corporate groups to the success of climate litigation efforts.

Chapter 7 examines both fiscal barriers and incentives to corporate climate action. Barriers such as fossil fuel subsidies and relative political inaction on that issue (at the World Trade Organization and other fora) and on the issue of carbon taxes are assessed. In contrast, the picture at the institutional investor level looks more active, with investors becoming increasingly concerned about the risks of climate change to fiscal stability. Issues of stranded assets, divestment, short-termism and financial regulatory developments are covered. In addition, some limited climate litigation initiated by investors (and its mixed results) is assessed. Varying jurisdictional approaches to sustainable investing from the SEC in the United States to the Bank of England in the United Kingdom are highlighted. Recent statements by Lord Sales at the Anglo-Australasian Law Society, as well as by the institutional investor BlackRock, in 2019 are indicative of a changing approach to climate investing. Regulatory developments requiring climate risk disclosure by the Department for Works and Pension, guidance by the Financial Conduct Authority and the focus on ESG investing in the EU, all signal the slow greening of capital in the context of climate change.

The essentially open-textured quality of political discourse that an equivocal (equi-vocal) norm suggests does not simply allow for many voices to be heard – it mandates it.Likewise, governance benefits from the pragmatism inherent in a norm that eschews absolutes and formulaic solutions in favor of bespoke designs, tailormade for environmental problems that vary in character by location and time.The forces of globalization make legislative oversight of administrative action difficult, if not impossible, by multiplying accountability challenges across multiple governance levels and processes.Using existing administrative competencies, a deliberative model of transnational democratic accountability can build on the functions that intergovernmental organizations already perform tolerably well without relying on new legislative inputs or continuous monitoring by elected officials.Two features of democratic deliberation – its tendency to reduce moral disputes and to promote consensus – can reduce the costs of organization maintenance in stakeholder communities that offer non-legislative alternatives for administrative oversight.The EU is a pioneer of transnational democratic oversight and administrative accountability, and its incremental and trial and error innovations, as inadequate as they still are, offer lessons for the problem of accountability in the absence of effective legislative authority.

Chapter 4 assesses the history of companies in the international environmental law movement.Traditional voluntary-only approaches of industry groups to international environmental law led to a burgeoning of largely voluntary corporate social responsibility (CSR) initiatives. A review of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change and the Kyoto Protocol are provided, along with a detailed examination of the Paris Agreement. Unlike previous experiences with international environmental law, many non-state actors supported the Paris Agreement, and some even wanted to become a party to it. While it remains a state-based treaty, non-state actors have become a main pillar of its implementation, particularly its long-term temperature goals. This international consensus shifting on climate change has led to new CSR and private environmental governance initiatives, specifically around climate change. These are eliciting a compliance reaction from many companies, with net-zero emissions targets announced by a variety of industry actors. Examples of Canadian Supreme Court decisions around corporate citizenship, the King IV Report from South Africa and CSR provisions in the Indian Companies Act 2013, as well as new corporate climate reporting requirements in the United Kingdom based on the recommendations of the Task Force on Climate-Related Financial Disclosures, are illustrative of this shift.

Over the course of a little more than a decade, an unusually coherent and comprehensive literature has emerged on the demands of effective earth system governance. Informed by the insight that humanity is no longer (and can no longer be) a spectator with respect to global environmental change, the concept of earth system governance recognizes that human actions have had an impact on our planet that has driven, and is driving, its primary ecological systems beyond the range of their natural variability. As a result, humans face a challenge like no other – the necessity to actively and self-consciously govern the environment that sustains us.

In the Anthropocene, earth system governance must be effective both within and across identities, and the inescapable equivocality of democratic governance means that discussions can never be closed but merely transformed as old problems and concerns give way to new.The experimental quality that effective environmental governance must possess cannot be a transient quality but, rather, must be a permanent feature of the landscape of democratic decision-making, in which success is realized in a context of identity politics.To take place without distortion and without posing systemic disadvantage, and for intergroup differences to be accommodated, substantial equality of access to decision-making and equitable allocation of fundamental capabilities are essential prerequisites.Institutional arrangements must provide for empowerment of those whose identities are otherwise ill-favored and the embeddedness of environmental decision-making in the communities of fate where people actually determine their shared life experiences.

More than just democracy in the form of aggregation of votes, deliberative democratic practice makes possible the learning, local knowledge, and engagement required by enlightened environmental governance under the conditions associated with the concept of the Anthropocene.