Over the last decades, the Global Environmental Governance legal framework has been dramatically changed. Scholars and practitioners working on International Environmental Law have witnessed the emergence of many diverse actors and proliferation of rules originating from many spheres of power and having a potential global impact. A new form of private driven and multilevel global governance is being put in to place, this because globalization has transformed the international context in several ways, mainly by increasing the role of companies and private entities.

Comparing to the substantial increase in the economic power of companies, many national governments become weak and no longer are in the position of exercising their regulatory power. Stricter rules could represent less investment of the companies in their countries. This decreases the capacity and interest of the national governments to demand from company’s compliance with standards especially social and environmental ones. And as production and trade is done in the global market, players facing fewer regulations have advantages over the competitors.

Three basic developments made possible the actual integration of global supply chains necessary for our present global production: revolutionary information technologies innovations in all spheres of society, capital mobility, and risky financial instruments. These characteristics pose challenges to traditional spheres of power and make it possible for new actors to participate in the political arena effectively enough to tilt the balance of power, and cause ripple effects such as consumer concerns and media publicity. These diffuse effects can influence government policies, set the international agenda and increases the space to private environmental governance for example though the adoption of voluntary sustainability standards by companies or non-governmental organizations.

These voluntary sustainability standards attest about the environmental and/or social compliance of the production processes and the supply chains. Despite not having much direct government intervention, these regulations are interdependent with the legal regulatory framework in place in the State, region, and city they operate. And the public authorities have an important role to stimulate or disincentive this private environmental governance in many ways. On the consumers perspective, the adoption of codes of ethics, the submission of the operation to sustainability reports, constant verification of compliance, independent third parties’ assessments, and certifications become expected from the ethical business.

But what is this myriad of voluntary sustainability standards being adopted? What are their impacts into global trade? How can this be governed? The research will try to shed a light on these topics. The methodology will be three-fold: descriptive research, evaluative-empirical approach, and normative-conceptual analysis. In the first part it will describe the state of affairs, as it exists at present relating to private environmental governance. Secondly it will conduct an evaluative research to infer the existence of a causal mechanism and the parts that interconnect the private environmental governance to global trade. Third it will seek to generate policy relevant knowledge on the integration of public, private and multi-layers policy instruments.