There is growing interest in the use of market mechanisms, such as offsetting and payments for ecosystem services, to further the conservation of biodiversity. The specific needs of biodiversity mean that this approach faces significant challenges in terms of defining the units that can be the subject of the economic or market devices, of ensuring that such mechanisms do deliver conservation gains and of establishing appropriate governance arrangements. There are also ethical concerns that a market approach entails a commodification of nature which sacrifices some of the very elements which make nature valuable to us. The market-based schemes currently being operated and devised should be studied carefully to see how successfully these challenges can be met.

The emergence of market mechanisms for the protection of biodiversity and ecosystem services in recent years has been portrayed by most conservation institutions and epistemological frameworks as an unprecedented opportunity for the conservation of nature. This article shifts the focus from the improved effectiveness arguments concerning such mechanisms to examine their institutional and political context and origins. It outlines the field of transnational biodiversity markets and uncovers the normative biases it displays. The regulatory vocabulary of ‘market mechanisms’ is juxtaposed to the more explicit ideological approach professed by the critics of neoliberalism. The argument is that, rather than an inevitable component in contemporary conservation governance, market mechanisms imply a set of contested choices for certain values, a particular economic development trajectory, a particular understanding of the biodiversity problem, and a weak role for legal obligations. Transnational environmental law needs to establish its interest beyond that of the regulation literature if it is to account for the proliferating movements around the world in favour of a reasserted normative guidance for the markets and against the process of marketing the market.

Markets in ecosystem services have the potential to provide financial incentives to protect the environment either in lieu of or in addition to more traditional regulatory programmes. If these markets function properly, they can provide enhanced levels of environmental quality or more efficient mechanisms for protecting natural resources that provide vital services to humans. The theoretical benefits of ecosystem services markets may be undercut, however, if care is not taken in creating the legal infrastructure that supports trading to ensure that trades actually provide the promised environmental benefits. This article identifies five essential pillars of an ecosystem services market regime that are necessary to provide operational accountability safeguards. These include financial safeguards, verifiable performance standards, transparency and public participation standards, regulatory oversight mechanisms, and rule of law safeguards. The article assesses whether the laws of the United States (US) and European Union (EU) are well designed to provide such accountability. It concludes that despite recognition of the risk of market manipulation and outright fraud, regulators in the US and the EU to date have responded to these risks largely in an ad hoc and incomplete fashion, rather than embedding the mechanisms for operational accountability discussed in this article into the regulatory framework that governs ecosystem services trading markets.

Our point of analytical departure is that the state of the global environment is deteriorating despite the accumulating body of international environmental law. By drawing on the recent Earth system science concept of interlinked planetary boundaries, this article makes a case for a goal-oriented, purposive system of multilateral environmental agreements. The notion of ‘goal’ is used here to mean a single, legally binding, superior norm – a grundnorm – that gives all international regimes and organizations a shared purpose to which their specific objectives must contribute. A bird’s eye view of the international environmental law system reveals how the absence of a unifying goal has created a condition that is conducive to environmental problem shifting rather than problem solving. We argue that a clearly agreed goal would provide the legal system with a point of reference for legal reasoning and interpretation, thereby enhancing institutional coherence across Earth’s subsystems. To this end, this article concludes by observing that the protection of the integrity of Earth’s life-support system has emerged as a common denominator among international environmental law instruments. Accordingly, we suggest that this notion is a strong candidate for the overarching goal of international environmental law.

In the wake of the Global Financial Crisis and worsening collateral social and environmental problems, socially responsible investing (SRI) has garnered more interest internationally as a potential civilizing influence on the financial economy. In particular, SRI is increasingly conceptualized as a means to promote environmentally sustainable development by disciplining financial markets to be more attentive to their ecological impacts. In this sense, SRI emerges as a putative form of transnational governance that utilizes non-state actors and mechanisms to promote sustainability in an economic sector that traditionally has had little accountability for its environmental performance. But as a largely voluntary movement, with rudimentary legal support, SRI so far has wielded limited clout.

A hindrance to the aspirations of SRI is deficiencies in its rationales. This article critiques the main theories advanced to justify SRI from the perspective of their contribution to promoting environmental sustainability: the complicity-based doctrine, leverage-based responsibility, and the universal owner thesis. Apart from gaps or limitations shown in each rationale, the article demonstrates that they conflict with the existing parameters of fiduciary law responsibility of financial institutions. An alternative rationale that emphasizes the temporal perspective to invest over the long term is suggested as a better approach for SRI if it is to be relevant to the pressing challenges of promoting sustainability and governing global financial markets.

Because transnational environmental crime (TEC) can result in the demise of an environmental resource or irreversible damage to the environment and has implications for national and global security, its prevention is a critical issue. Deterrence through law enforcement can go only a limited distance towards preventing TEC. However, there is a huge potential for third parties to be active participants, alongside governmental authorities, in crafting and implementing strategies for TEC prevention. This article explores the ways in which states can catalyze third parties – non-state, non-offending actors – to contribute their own capacities towards the pursuit of preventive outcomes. It draws together concepts and theories from policing studies, criminology and regulatory studies to highlight changing relationships between the state and non-state actors with respect to crime control, and applies them to TEC. Examples and illustrations used in the article relate mainly to efforts to combat the illegal wildlife trade. The article concludes that a more systematic approach to TEC prevention involving third parties is needed, and that this requires dedicated strategic analysis and planning on the part of states, working individually and together.

EU law is teeming with framework norms – ‘laws in progress’. They provide little clarity for those to whom they apply, engendering rule-making in networks to assist those charged with implementing and applying laws at the national level. Taking as its specific focus the particular process through which the concept of an ‘article’ was constructed and constituted in a set of negotiations around the EU Chemicals Regulation, REACH, this article shows that networks not only make framework norms operational but also transform them in the process. The fact that networks have an important role in laying out what the law says throws the effectiveness of traditional forms of accountability in doubt. In particular, judicial control is in need of rethinking in order to accommodate norms that change and the networks that change them. This article suggests looking at the connections between internal peer control and externally operating judicial control as a way to keep up with the progress of laws in progress.