BEYOND CLIMATE COMPLIANCE: procedural fairness, exporter inclusion, and dispute prevention under the eu carbon border adjustment mechanism

Unofficial AI-generated summary based on the public title and abstract. Not an official translation.

🔬研究者:This paper provides a novel procedural fairness framework for carbon border adjustment mechanisms, useful for scholars studying CBAM, trade law, and climate governance.

🏢実務担当者:Corporate sustainability teams can use the Fair Treatment Procedural Matrix to audit CBAM compliance processes and prepare for verification and appeals.

🏛政策担当者:Policymakers can adopt the dispute-prevention toolkit to design more inclusive and legitimate carbon border measures.

Carbon border measures—particularly emissions-based border adjustment regimes—operate in practice as hybrid instruments: while justified as climate policy, they impose compliance duties, assessments, monetary liabilities, penalties, and review processes that resemble those of tax and customs administration. This hybrid design poses governance and legitimacy challenges for “fair and free trade” agendas: if procedures are opaque, discretionary, or excessively burdensome, carbon border measures may exclude smaller exporters, deepen North–South asymmetries, and increase the likelihood of disputes in trade and investment fora. This article develops a conceptual fair-treatment framework for carbon border measures, focusing on procedural fairness and dispute prevention for exporters, with particular attention to EU–Latin America trade relations. The article makes three contributions. First, it maps the exporter’s procedural journey and identifies recurring friction points (scope and classification, emissions methodology, verification, correction windows, assessments, penalties, and review). Second, it proposes a Fair Treatment Procedural Matrix that sets minimum safeguards at each stage: notice and guidance, access to evidence, an opportunity to respond and cure, reasoned decision-making, proportional enforcement, and effective appeal. Third, it offers a dispute-prevention toolkit grounded in transparency, cooperative compliance, mutual recognition of verification, phased implementation, and proportionality-based cost mitigation. The framework provides policymakers with actionable guidance to reconcile environmental ambition with governance, legitimacy, and inclusive participation in international trade.

• openalex https://doi.org/10.51799/2763-8685v6n1001first seen 2026-07-30 05:19:23