This article is part of a Synergies series on Next generation trade arrangements for environment and sustainable development. Any views and opinions expressed are those of the author(s).

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The Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP) is the largest trade agreement in the world, covering fifteen economies, roughly 30 percent of global output, and a comparable share of the world’s population. It is also, by the standards of recent mega-regional agreements, close to silent on sustainability. It contains no environment chapter, no labour chapter, and no dedicated trade and sustainable development (TSD) chapter of the kind now standard in agreements concluded by the European Union (EU) and in the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership (CPTPP).

That silence must be tested. RCEP contains a built-in general review clause, and at the 5th RCEP Summit in Kuala Lumpur in October 2025 leaders instructed their ministers and officials to begin preparing for a general review of the agreement scheduled for 2027. In the same statement, they committed to advancing the economic cooperation agenda to address longer-term emerging challenges such as climate change, digital transformation, and supply chain vulnerabilities. For an agreement that barely mentions the living environment, naming climate change as a shared challenge is a meaningful shift in register, even if it falls well short of a negotiating mandate.

It is worth being clear about what the review actually is, because 2027 is a milestone rather than a moment. 2026 is the year of direction-setting, when terms of reference, a scoping study, and early stakeholder input take shape; 2027 is when endorsed recommendations are delivered and upgrade negotiations are launched; the negotiations themselves run through 2028 and 2029; and a first amendment protocol would enter into force around 2030, a decade after RCEP was signed. The choices that determine whether sustainability features at all are therefore made early, in 2026, and largely before formal negotiation begins.

The question is not whether RCEP should take on a sustainability dimension. The review, the leaders’ language, and the direction of travel in comparable agreements all point to some movement coming. The more useful question is what kind? Our argument is that the more productive path is not to graft on the enforceable, standards-policing TSD chapters of the EU or the CPTPP, but to build a cooperative agenda around a different idea: managing the interdependence that the clean energy transition creates among its members or “transition interdependence.” The encouraging thing is that RCEP’s own members have already shown, in a neighbouring agreement, what it can look like.

RCEP’s design is best understood as binding but shallow. Its market access and rules commitments are legally enforceable, yet its coverage of the newer trade agenda is thin. Comparative textual work by the UN Economic and Social Commission for Asia and the Pacific (ESCAP) confirms the pattern: reviewing RCEP against the CPTPP and the EU-Japan Economic Partnership Agreement across seven sustainable development topics, Malingrey and Duval found large gaps in RCEP’s coverage of environment, labour, and related areas. Analysis by the Asian Development Bank likewise notes that RCEP does not include provisions on labour or environmental standards, or on state-owned enterprises.

This is not the same as saying RCEP is hostile to sustainability. The preamble refers to sustainable development. The general exceptions in Chapter 17 incorporate the familiar GATT Article XX language, preserving members’ room to adopt measures necessary to protect human, animal, or plant life and health, and to conserve exhaustible natural resources, subject to the usual disciplines against disguised protectionism. There is a Committee on Sustainable Growth, and an economic and technical cooperation framework aimed at narrowing development gaps. What RCEP lacks is not policy space but a programme: it has the defensive architecture of a modern agreement without the affirmative commitments.

That gap matters more now than it did in 2020 when the agreement came into force, and not only on principle. Utilization of RCEP remains modest, with business survey evidence suggesting that awareness runs well ahead of actual use and that the agreement’s heaviest users are the three Northeast Asian economies treating it as a surrogate free trade agreement among themselves. Much of the review’s centre of gravity will therefore, quite reasonably, sit on implementation and utilization rather than on new chapters. The question for sustainability is how it fits within that discipline, not how it displaces it.

The most relevant benchmark for RCEP is not in Brussels or in the CPTPP. It is within. The upgraded ASEAN-Australia-New Zealand Free Trade Area (AANZFTA), whose Second Protocol entered into force in April 2025, introduced a dedicated Trade and Sustainable Development chapter, the first such chapter in any FTA concluded by ASEAN. It provides a framework for cooperation on environmental protection, climate change, the green and blue economy, and labour standards. Crucially, it imposes no binding obligations, and matters arising under it are excluded from the agreement’s dispute settlement mechanism.

Two things about this matter for RCEP. First, AANZFTA covers twelve of RCEP’s fifteen members: all ten ASEAN states, plus Australia and New Zealand. A TSD chapter is therefore no longer alien to this membership; most of it has already signed one. Second, the form that ASEAN chose is revealing. Faced with the option of a cooperative, dialogue-based chapter or an enforceable one, ASEAN and its two partners chose cooperation and deliberately placed the chapter outside dispute settlement. That choice is the clearest available signal of where the regional consensus ceiling sits.

The other benchmarks sit further along the same spectrum, and neither is really a model to copy wholesale. The CPTPP, to which seven RCEP members belong, contains a full environment chapter subject to binding dispute settlement, though its core discipline is largely to enforce one’s own environmental laws rather than to raise them. The EU has travelled furthest towards enforceability: its June 2022 review of the TSD approach committed the Union to extend general state-to-state dispute settlement—with trade sanctions as a last resort—to breaches of core sustainability commitments including the Paris Agreement, a model first applied in the EU-New Zealand agreement now in force. Seen against this spectrum, RCEP is the outlier at one end, the only one of these overlapping arrangements with no sustainability chapter at all, while its own members have already settled, in AANZFTA, on a cooperative template near the other.

The AANZFTA choice was not an accident, and it tells us a lot about what is feasible in RCEP. The latter operates by consensus across an unusually heterogeneous membership, from high-income economies such as Australia, Japan, and Singapore to least-developed members such as Cambodia, Lao PDR, and Myanmar. A sanctions-backed obligation must clear the least willing member, and in a bloc built on ASEAN centrality and the norm of non-interference, enforcement-heavy conditionality imposed by richer partners cuts against the group’s founding instincts. Excluding the TSD chapter from dispute settlement, as AANZFTA did, is how the region squares a commitment to sustainability with those instincts.

There is a second reason, and it is more than procedural. Much of the region reads the current wave of unilateral trade and climate measures, above all the EU’s Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism and its Deforestation Regulation, as green protectionism: measures with a climate label that fall most heavily on developing country exporters. Indonesia’s nickel measures have themselves been the subject of WTO litigation, and large emerging economies have repeatedly argued that such instruments sit uneasily with the principle of common but differentiated responsibilities. A bloc wary of externally imposed standards is unlikely to write the enforcement of externally derived standards into its own agreement, even as it proves willing to cooperate on shared objectives.

The two anchor cases within RCEP show how wide the internal spectrum is. At one end, Australia pairs its RCEP membership with an activist green trade agenda elsewhere: a Green Economy Agreement with Singapore, a green partnership with Korea, a recently concluded EU FTA carrying a binding Paris Agreement commitment, and CPTPP environment obligations. Australia has both the capacity and the inclination to push for sustainability content. At the other end, Indonesia’s nickel policy, export ban from 2020, and downstreaming drive embodies a developmental state logic in which industrial policy and value capture come first, and in which environmental language is invoked both for and against the same measures. Indonesia enters the review guarding its policy space and wary of importing disciplines that could constrain that strategy. Between these poles sits the ASEAN core as the institutional centre of gravity, and with it a settled preference for cooperation over confrontation. None of that is cause for gloom. It is just the design constraint, and it points fairly clearly to the kind of agenda that could actually pass.

Cooperative, though, does not have to mean empty. The clean energy transition is generating real and growing interdependence among RCEP members: in critical mineral supply chains, in trade in solar panels, batteries, and other low-emissions goods, in the standards and certification systems that increasingly govern market access, and in the information that producers must generate to prove the emissions content of what they sell. Managing that interdependence well is a substantive agenda, and it is one on which even wary members share an interest.

Emma Aisbett made this point well in a recent piece for this series. The biggest trade cost of all these climate measures, she argues, is not the measures themselves but their fragmentation, and the practical fix is interoperability: letting producers generate, verify, and report information such as embedded emissions once, then use it to reach many markets. Crucially, interoperability does not require members to agree on the same climate ambition or the same thresholds for what counts as clean. It requires agreement on the plumbing, on data definitions, measurement methods, and the like, while leaving the politically sensitive choices to each government.

That fits RCEP’s constraints well. It reduces the trade friction that developing members fear, it lowers costs disproportionately for the small and medium-sized exporters that RCEP’s cooperation agenda already prioritizes, and it does so without asking anyone to cede regulatory sovereignty or accept externally set standards. A cooperative RCEP sustainability agenda organized around interoperability, standards convergence, and critical minerals cooperation would extend the AANZFTA template rather than import a foreign one, and it would speak directly to the transition interdependence that is already reshaping the region’s trade. It would also position RCEP as a constructive regional answer to the anxiety about unilateral measures, a carrot to set beside others’ sticks, rather than as a laggard to be measured against them.

None of this needs to arrive at once, and both RCEP’s structure and the emerging practitioner consensus suggest a sequence. That consensus also comes with a warning: with utilization still modest and the membership diverse, the review should concentrate on a limited set of high-impact areas rather than reopen every chapter or absorb every wish list. A sustainability agenda that ignores this discipline will not survive it.

Two things tend to get run together here, and they are worth pulling apart. The first is cooperation: interoperability of emissions data, convergence on standards and eco-labelling, capacity building for less-developed members, and critical minerals collaboration. This strand is non-binding by design, it asks no member to harmonize ambition, and it is the sort of low-cost, practical work that practitioners have pointed to as an early win, since it mostly means converging on what the region’s overlapping agreements already share; businesses, for their part, are supportive of a more sustainable RCEP. It is the AANZFTA register, an ASEAN-owned template already accepted by twelve of the RCEP’s members, and it is where consensus is easiest to reach.

The second strand is commitment, and here RCEP has something the cooperative agreements around it do not. Its market access commitments are binding and enforceable, which makes it the natural home for the one affirmative sustainability commitment the region could plausibly make hard: a negotiated schedule liberalizing trade in environmental goods and services, bound under RCEP’s own dispute settlement rather than carved out of it as AANZFTA’s cooperative chapter was. This is the more concrete, second step in the two-step path that ESCAP’s Malingrey and Duval set out for the review, to follow an initial and softer chapter reflecting commitments members have already made. Seen this way, being binding but shallow is less a weakness than an opening: a green goods schedule is exactly the kind of affirmative commitment the agreement now lacks, and the machinery to hold it, in the general review clause (Article 20.8), the Committee on Sustainable Growth (Article 18.2), and the dispute settlement chapter (Chapter 19), is already in place, with the forthcoming RCEP Secretariat to support it.

The point that matters most in practice is about timing and mechanism. The original RCEP negotiations, and more recently the ASEAN Digital Economy Framework Agreement negotiations, were each launched from a short Guiding Principles and Objectives document that fixed scope and kept talks on track. Practitioners recommend the same device for the review, with principles ideally adopted in 2026. This is the decisive window. If both strands, the cooperative agenda and a binding green goods schedule, are named among the guiding principles at the direction-setting stage, they have a place in the negotiations that follow; if they are not, they are unlikely to be added later. The 2026 phase, which will draw on Track 1.5 dialogue, business consultation, and written expert input, is therefore where contributions such as this one are most likely to matter. The accession pipeline may also shift the odds at the margin over time, as applicants such as Chile, an active proponent of climate and trade cooperation, could tilt the internal balance towards the greener end of the spectrum.

RCEP’s 2027 review is the most significant near-term opportunity to connect trade and sustainability across the Indo-Pacific, precisely because RCEP is so large and, so far, so quiet on the subject. It would be a mistake, though, to judge that opportunity by whether RCEP comes to resemble the EU or the CPTPP. Those models were built for different memberships and different politics. The more useful design principle is to cooperate where cooperation is all that consensus allows, and to commit where RCEP is actually strong.

Cooperation means the AANZFTA register that twelve of its own members have already accepted: interoperability, standards convergence, and critical minerals collaboration, organized around the transition interdependence that already binds these economies together. Commitment means using RCEP’s one real advantage, its binding and enforceable core, to make the kind of affirmative pledge the cooperative agreements around it cannot, in a negotiated environmental goods and services schedule.

That combination, soft where it must be and hard where it can be, is both more honest about RCEP’s constraints and more ambitious about its possibilities than a straight choice between the two. Whether RCEP’s members take it up, and name it early enough in 2026 to survive the process, is for now an open question, and one this series is well placed to keep asking.

* This piece uses “sustainability” broadly to include environmental and climate objectives. RCEP’s members have to date engaged the agenda chiefly through the lens of economic cooperation rather than through binding trade and sustainable development commitments, a distinction we treat as central rather than incidental.

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Harry Wardana is Lecturer and Research Fellow, Institute for International Trade and Jean Monnet Centre of Excellence in Trade and Environment, Adelaide University.

Peter Draper is Executive Director, Institute for International Trade and Jean Monnet Centre of Excellence in Trade and Environment, Adelaide University.

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