Chapter 4 discusses the application of Art. 34 TFEU to private rules. Art. 34 TFEU prohibits quantitative restrictions to trade between Member States and measures having equivalent effects. The chapter attempts to understand if, and if so, under which circumstances, Art. 34 TFEU is horizontally applicable also to private measures restricting access to the market. It subsequently discusses the rather limited possibilities and conditions under which a VSS could fall by Art. 34 TFEU, the possible outcome of an Art. 34 TFEU assessment, and possible justification for a breach that can be invoked by private parties. Starting from the EU treatment of private regulation and technical standards, the chapter then studies the interactions between EU authorities and various types of standards in the internal market. It analyses the forms of direct and indirect employment of VSS in EU measures disciplining sustainability in global value chains. The chapter analyses their impact on the allocation of regulatory competences between public and private authority, the implications for substance and procedures of schemes and the trade-barrier effects and schemes’ stringency.

Chapter 6 studies the substantive meta-rules of the TBT Code of Good Practice. As the Appellate Body never provided interpretive guidance over these provisions, how to apply them to standards and VSS remains unclear. Chapter 6 analyses crucial TBT principles providing that standards do not discriminate, do not create unnecessary barriers to trade and are based on relevant international standards. The interpretation of similar TBT provisions concerning technical regulations is used as guidance in understanding the transposition of these obligations and in suggesting how these legal tests are applicable to VSS. The chapter acknowledges the peculiar nature of standards identifying products with distinct quality features such as VSS. It identifies relevant differences from technical standards that must be taken into account for interpretive purposes. These include the objectives pursued by a scheme that can be accepted as legitimate, the implications of the treatment-no-less-favourable standard on measures that structurally distort competitive opportunities and whether the detrimental impact generated stems exclusively from a legitimate regulatory distinction.

The introduction presents the subject matter of the book, the structure of the volume, and the questions it attempts to answer. Among these questions, the book investigates the relation and extent of complementarity between VSS and international law rules in the social and environmental domains, as well as trade. It aims to understand the modalities of public use of VSS in market regulation, their complementarity with EU rules and their implications. The book then studies how EU internal market and WTO legal regimes can control, coordinate and review VSS. In particular it proposes a possible interpretation of EU and WTO legal rules and meta-rules, in view of addressing the trade barrier effects of VSS and to possibly scale-up their effectiveness.

In Chapter 3, we continue exploring how firms adapt to the intensity of chronic nature adversity conditions. Our goal in this chapter is to contribute to the debate in the strategic management literature on whether external adversity tends to be positively or negatively related to adaptation. We propose an inverted U-shaped relationship between nature adversity intensity and protective adaptation, such that firms facing lower or higher than medium levels of nature adversity intensity tend to adopt lower levels of protective adaptation. Business adapatation is at its highest at at medium levels of nature adversity. Additionally, we discuss how our proposed inverted U-shaped relationship between nature adversity intensity and protective adaptation is likely to be moderated by several firm-level and institutional context-level characteristics (i.e., age, public ownership, slack resources, and stringency of regulations).

Chapter 5 extends the analysis to public international law and international trade law. It aims to understand what is the expected behaviour of WTO Members towards VSS. The chapter begins by assessing the possibility of attributing VSS conduct to WTO Members under the customary rules for attribution and their transposition to the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT). The chapter analyses EU practice towards VSS against such a framework to clarify under which circumstances public use of VSS and coordination of regulatory effects give rise to attribution and would make Members responsible for WTO-inconsistent effects of VSS. Chapter 5 then scrutinises the TBT provisions applicable to WTO Members. The chapter discusses whether VSS bodies can be considered as non-governmental standardising bodies under the TBT Agreement. Subsequently, it studies the due diligence obligation for Members in Art. 4.1 TBT that requires them to take reasonably available measures to ensure that non-governmental standardising bodies act in line with the principles in the TBT Code of Good Practice, and the requirement in Art. 4.1 TBT not to encourage deviations from the TBT Code.

Chapter 1 frames VSS within the transnational emergence of a regulatory space for private actors due to the difficulty for States to unilaterally regulate transboundary phenomena and the impasse at the multilateral level. Civil society organisations, producers and retailers thus emerged as regulatory actors in the domain of sustainability. Relevant characteristics of VSS are discussed in preparation for the legal analysis. The chapter also illustrates key differences between technical standards and VSS tackling, respectively, network externalities and policy externalities. Three ideal–typical categories of VSS are designed to facilitate and fine-tune the legal analysis, and to clarify the extent of public reach vis-à-vis each of three groups. The three categories of multi-stakeholder, sectoral and company schemes are established on the basis of the actors participating in standard-setting, its procedures and normative justifications behind the schemes. The chapter then illustrates the contested effectiveness of VSS, their frequent negative impact on trade and their distributional implications.

In Chapter 5, we continue to develop our conceptual framework describing how MNCs’ foreign subsidiary investments are affected by natural disasters. We do so by examining whether MNCs are able to gain experiential advantages from managing through low or high impact natural disasters that enable them to enter and expand into countries experiencing similar risks. We also conceptually discuss whether advantages accruing from MNCs’ subsidiary-level experience with natural disasters are greater than those from terrorist attacks or technological disasters. Discontinuous risks, such as natural disasters that are often difficult to anticipate or predict, have received little attention in the strategic management research. Much of the research in this area has focused on firms’ experience with continuous risks, risks that are steady and more predictable in a firm’s operating environment.