Description
The European Union (EU)’s recent unilateral trade instruments—most notably the EU Deforestation Regulation (EUDR)—have emerged as a flagship of “green regulatory power,” linking market access to the externalisation of sustainability standards. Yet, across the Global South, responses to the new EU Trade and Sustainable Development (TSD) regulations are far from uniform. While governments often denounce these measures as violations of sovereignty, domestic non-state actors respond in strikingly hybrid ways—not merely rejecting or accepting them but strategically repositioning themselves around them.
Comparing Brazil and Indonesia, this paper traces how agribusiness groups, environmental NGOs, and smallholder organisations navigate EU TSD governance. Drawing on document analysis, stakeholder statements, media discourse, and semi-structured interviews, it argues that responses to EU green regulatory power are not binary. Instead of simple compliance or resistance, Southern actors deploy EU TSD regulations as political resources—simultaneously contesting their legitimacy while selectively harnessing their effects. The paper reveals how Brazilian farm lobbies frame TSD regulations as protectionist interference, whereas many NGOs and producer associations weaponise them against domestic rivals; in Indonesia, responses are fragmented between reform-minded actors and those aligning with executive calls for flexibility. The study reopens and advances the Brussels Effect debate by decentring the EU and analysing how Global South actors actively shape and deconstruct, rather than merely receive, EU TSD governance.
