Abstract
This chapter argues that the sustainable development (SD) trans-industry regulation (TIR) contains no precise definition of SD within which explicitly chosen values have been a driving force. Refined by the Cardiff European Council in 1998 and confirmed by the 2001 sustainable development strategy (SDS), this approach formally requires the integration of environmental protection and SD within all sectoral policies. In short, SD has become 'a norm of EU politics, both domestically and internationally'. The trend towards flexible instruments such as voluntary agreements or incentive structures, such as eco-labelling, or more 'private' ones such as corporate social responsibility (CSR), partnerships with non-governmental organizations (NGOs) or private standards, have led to claims that privatization of regulation has occurred within industries. Since the early 1990s, EU environment policy has experienced a series of reorientations whilst representatives of the European Union (EU) have strongly positioned it as a leader in SD at the international scale.