The Basel Committee is the quintessential regulatory network. It has accomplished much through its specific and rigorous rules on capital adequacy, and yet those rules are nothing more than soft law, as Basel’s principals reiterate. Much of the change over time that has characterized the way the Basel Committee acts reflects an evolution towards bureaucratic governance, rather than the development of a unique and different form of cross-border governmental oversight.

This chapter focuses on the concept of time to evaluate the barriers and opportunities to environmentally responsible finance, and to assess existing governance reforms. With the sustainability discourse increasingly penetrating the financial economy, some investors and lenders profess to be more mindful of the value of long term and patient financial decisions, both for their own economic returns and environmental responsibility. However, the system of global finance capitalism, with its myopic and frenetic tempo, clashes with this aspiration. The movement for socially responsible investing, and the associated 'slow money' movement, are helping to inculcate more eco-friendly time-scales into the financial world. These movements are emerging agents of environmental governance, helping to overcome the lacunae and deficits in official regulation of the financial sector's environmental performance.

Like the Basel Committee, IOSCO is committed to increasingly elaborate administrative procedures – it now uses notice and comment for almost everything substantive that it does – and to bedrock principles that underlie much of its activities. IOSCO is also committed to peer review, and has set reviewable benchmarks for its members to encourage adoption of its memorandum of understanding on enforcement cooperation. It has also stuck to its preference for consensus on the principles that it has promulgated. And while the MOU on enforcement permits a degree of “dissensus” – it facilitates the enforcement of domestic standards through the gathering of evidence from across borders, though it does not require that domestic standards be shared–it does suggest that securities watchdogs are likely enough to embrace common enough values that they are willing to assist one another in the observance of them. Moreover, IOSCO’s core principles reflect the common ground, and search for a level playing field, that marks much of international financial regulation. And the turn to bureaucratic order and legal principle is observable in IOSCO, even though it has made only modest efforts to create a global model for securities regulation.

his chapter argues that capacity for corporate sustainability is shaped by over-arching rules determining trade and investment relations, but also that companies play a part in constructing those rules and their application. In this way, transnational state and corporate conduct are symbiotic, mutually capable of shaping each other. The General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade and the General Agreement on Trade in Services within the framework of the World Trade Organisation mediate the terms of import and export of goods and services, affecting corporate management of supply chain arrangements, but corporate influence also affects those rule-making and rule-administering processes. We investigate the capacity for norms promulgated through free trade agreements to affect the parameters of sustainable corporate conduct. Finally, we analyse the powers of corporations as investors, bearing in mind the current fragmented regime operating under international investment law alongside scope for reform.

The chapter explains the historic background of preferential trade, both in the area of goods and services. It also explains the key rules in different WTO agreements as well as their monitoring mechanisms.

The chapter starts Part III of the book, which concentrates on empirical study of services agreements. It explains earlier empirical research on services preferentialism and shows how the empirical methodology proposed in this book differs from such earlier works.