Transforming World Trade and Investment Law for Sustainable Development

<em>Transforming World Trade and Investment Law for Sustainable Development</em> explains why the 2030 UN Sustainable Development Agenda for Transforming our World--aimed at realizing universal human rights and the17 agreed sustainable development goals (SDGs)--requires transforming the UN and WTO legal systems as well as international investment law and adjudication. UN and WTO law protect regulatory competition between diverse neo-liberal state-capitalist European ordo-liberal and developing countries' conceptions of multilevel trade and investment regulation. However geopolitical rivalries and trade wars increasingly undermine transnational rule of law and effective regulation of market failures governance and constitutional failures. Protecting the WTO legal and dispute settlement system remains essential for SDGs such as climate change mitigation measures and access to medical supplies and vaccines in global health pandemics. Investment law and adjudication must better reconcile governmental duties to protect human rights and decarbonize economies with the property rights of foreign investors. <p/>The constitutional human rights and environmental litigation in Europe enhances the legal accountability of democratic governments for protecting sustainable development. However European economic constitutionalism has been rejected by neoliberalism China's authoritarian state-capitalism and many developing countries' governments. The more that regional economic orders (like the China-led Belt and Road networks) reveal heterogeneity and power politics block UN and WTO reforms the more the US-led neoliberal world order risks disintegrating. UN and WTO law must promote private-public network governance and civil society participation in order to stabilize and de-politicize multilevel governance that protects SDGs and global public goods.