CLIMATE-SMART AND SUSTAINABLE TRADE PROVISIONS IN RTAs IN ASIA PACIFIC AND WESTERN BALKANS: NVIVO ANALYSIS

Abstract

Climate-smart and sustainable trade represents a fundamental shift in how nations approach international trade. It acknowledges that the traditional trade model must evolve to address urgent environmental and climate-related challenges while simultaneously advancing goals related to sustainable development. As a result of the inability to tackle climate problems on a global level, many countries have adopted a policy for inclusion of such provisions in their free trade agreements. Although there is an ongoing debate about the advantages and disadvantages that climate-smart provisions have on international trade and the countries’ economic development, it is undisputed that in the past decades, their prominence in FTAs has increased significantly. The paper first analyzes the emergence of environmental and climate-related provisions in free trade agreements. It attempts to define climate and environment related provisions, explain the methods through which they are incorporated in free trade agreements, and assess the main reasons for the increased number of such provisions in the past decades. The paper then briefly analyses statistical data related to the types of environmental and climate related provisions contained in FTAs, before analyzing those provisions in trade agreements in the Asia- Pacific region. It further seeks to compare the trade agreements in this region with the regional trade agreements in the Western Balkans. To support the analysis, we apply the software package NVivo 14 used for qualitative analysis and provide results displayed through word clouds, word frequency and word trees. At the end of the paper, we provide a conclusion. The Nvivo analysis has confirmed the fact that there is still space for improvement and increasing the climate and environmental provisions in the agreements. The analysis has shown that although there is an increase in the climate-smart and environmental provisions in the Asia Pacific and Western Balkans countries regional trade agreements, they are still not enough to enable sustainable trade. The coverage of the words in all analyzed RTAs are very small ranging from 0.02% to 0.08% as the highest percentage of words included in a regional trade agreement. The results are even defeating when it can be seen that the word “climate” is rarely mentioned in all the analyzed agreements, and the word “sustainability” is rarely mentioned in the agreements of Western Balkans countries.