Governing at the nexus: international economic law in the age of the energy transition

Leonie Reins

Journal of Environmental Law, 2025, vol. 37, issue 3, 629-637

Abstract: In our era of accelerating climate change, dramatic loss of biodiversity, and unprecedented global energy transitions, the energy–environment nexus has come to discharge critical conceptual and regulatory functions. In this setting, the idea of a nexus—here, between energy, the environment, and international economic law—has become not so much an analytical device but a normative imperative. In Energy and the Environment, Sherzod Shadikhodjaev takes the nexus seriously: he casts it as a regulatory frontier, as a legal battleground, and as a thicket of closely interwoven obligations and opportunities. The arguments of Energy and the Environment, anchored though they may be in trade and investment law, lay bare the general mechanisms through which the existing legal regimes both enable and obstruct ecological transformation. The precision with which Shadikhodjaev expounds doctrine and critiques policy must surely invite legal scholars to rethink international economic law as a site of both friction and reform. In this critical review, I approach Energy and the Environment through the prism of the nexus thesis. What emerges from this enterprise, I hope, is a further call to integrate, to navigate complexity, and to rebalance the asymmetries between liberalization and sustainability.

Keywords: energy transition; climate change; international economic law; international trade law; international investment law (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2025
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