Description
After nearly 30 years of negotiations, the European Union (EU) and Mercosur reached, in 2024, a consensus on the trade pillar of the Association Agreement. Sustainable development, initially marginal in the talks, became one of the main points of tension between the blocs, reflecting the growing influence of environmental issues in European politics.
This article seeks to understand how and why environmental concerns gained exponential relevance in the negotiations only recently. The period between 2018 and 2020 marks this shift, and we argue that it stems from three main factors:
(1) the progressive rise in the importance of the environmental agenda for the EU, which gradually gained concreteness and clarity throughout the 2000s and 2010s;
(2) the strengthening of a social and political front opposing the agreement, driven by the broader mobilization of environmental movements acting alongside traditional European protectionist sectors; (3) the intensification of the previous factors amid increasing deforestation in Brazil and the stagnation of multilateral environmental governance regimes.
The analysis is based on an extensive documentary and bibliographic review of the negotiations, in order to contextualize the shift in how environmental issues were addressed in the biregional talks. The study shows that while the EU initially chose not to include strong environmental provisions in the agreement, the growing concreteness of its environmental agenda, together with internal political pressures and social mobilizations, led it to adopt a stricter stance — even requiring the EU–Mercosur Agreement to be linked to the Paris Agreement on Climate Change.
