Global environmental meetings provide a locale for understanding how multilateral environmental agreements (MEAs) become words on paper that shape international practices and norms. These meetings are central sites of global environmental agreement-making because they provide diverse actors with a negotiation space and process for the development of treaty text. This chapter provides practical guidance to those who attend, observe, and collect data at MEA negotiation sites. It will help researchers design and implement their studies, and situate their academic work into the negotiation process. Scholars, students, and observers at all stages of their careers will find this chapter useful when preparing to attend a MEA supreme body meeting, navigating on-site, and working to understand and analyze their observations afterward. It can also help when choosing whether to attend in person or not, highlighting the digital resources now available that make that decision even easier. In sum, by unpacking the multiple actors, sites, and processes through which environmental agreements are made and the new arrangements these create, this chapter helps the reader find the appropriate site for their research and navigate the events more confidently.

The use of trade policy instruments to support the achievement of environmental protection objectives goes back at least to 1973 when the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES) was concluded. From its use of non-automatic licensing systems to control trade of certain species covered by that agreement, to outright bans on the trade of certain products as found in the Montreal Protocol on Substances that Deplete the Ozone Layer (Montreal Protocol), countries have often agreed to use specific trade policy measures or instruments as a means to implement the goals of multilateral environmental agreements. Moreover, while those measures may often run counter to the trade obligations agreed to in other international agreements, countries accept these specific conflicts between competing treaties as the trade policy measures have been identified as necessary for the implementation and achievement of the objectives of these multilateral environmental agreements.

In Chapter 6, William David looks at the inter-linkages between trade and environment in various FTAs and provides a thorough examination of new provisions in the environment chapters of regional trade agreements and how they may impact Indigenous peoples. Particular emphasis is placed on an exploration of the North American Agreement on Environmental Cooperation (NAAEC), a side agreement of the NAFTA, as well as the CPTPP and the intersection between Indigenous rights, environmental law and ISDS under the NAFTA.