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Abstract:
This Article proposes a restatement of the debate on Non- Governmental Organizations’ (NGO) participation in the World Trade Organization (WTO). Moving away from the traditional emphasis on NGO participation in Geneva, the Article suggests that the discussion should include the broader category of non-state actors and their role in the WTO system of multi-level governance at both the international and the domestic levels. Lessons learned from empirical research on non-state actor participation in the WTO, particularly in the post-Doha period, provide new insights into how the WTO system of trade governance functions and the role non-state actors are increasingly required to play in such governance. The Article asks how does non-state actor participation within the WTO system alter conventional concepts of trade governance and ideas about how the WTO regime governs international trade relations? How are non-state actors (including NGOs) already participating within the WTO system? This Article suggests that the debate on non-state actor participation in the WTO system be reorganized around three questions: (1) What should be the objectives for the WTO’s engagement with non-state actors? (2) With what kinds of non-state actors should the WTO engage? (3) Through which structures should the WTO engage non-state actors? This Article goes on to identify a key objective for WTO institutional reform on participation by non-state actors. It recommends that WTO reform efforts targeting greater transparency and integration with non-state actors contribute to the reform of domestic trade policy-making processes in member states. The WTO system ought to facilitate greater participation and consultation with non-state stakeholders at the national level of trade policy-making.

NGOs and the WTO, WTO external relations

Abstract:
This paper examines whether and why the WTO institutional reform project should concern itself with the role of non-state actors at the domestic level of trade policymaking. The current disfunctionality in the WTO regime is attributable to a lack of congruence between the evolved power structure and the original "social purpose" of the regime. Current difficulties in negotiating the Doha round are a manifestation of a struggle between regime participants over defining the new social purpose of the WTO. The search for the new social purpose of the global trade regime must derive its content from the appropriate social purpose of domestic governance among the new configuration of influential regime participants. A new embedded liberalism compromise must emerge from within the domestic politics of WTO members, and must reflect the changed power structure in the global political economy. The paper highlights the reflexive and dynamic linkages between the domestic and the international in the functioning of the WTO. Conceptualizing the WTO as a system of multi-level governance (which includes the international and the domestic as sites of governance) is useful to design reform proposals. WTO reform should address the domestic origins of the WTO crisis. It should recommend changes in WTO rules and processes to stimulate reform of domestic trade policymaking towards more broad-based and inclusive stake-holder participation. The Trade Policy Review Mechanism of the WTO can be deepened to include the review of member-state consultation mechanisms for trade policy-making at the domestic level. A Declaration to this effect should be adopted by the WTO General Council. Such a Declaration could contain non-binding guidelines to assist governments in the design of domestic consultation procedures and for the evaluation of Members' consultation procedures. Domestic consultations between the public, the private and the non-profit sectors are indispensable to good trade policy and for the formulation of national interest in trade. Adequate domestic consultations are particularly absent in most developing and least-developed countries.

WTO institutional reform, reform of domestic trade policy-making, WTO trade governance

Abstract:
This paper argues that at this time of India's ongoing 'Great Transformation,' legal educators and researchers in India need to pay greater attention to international economic law, and that a renewal of the approach to teaching IEL, could provide significant contributions to both the objectives and outcomes of 'reform' in India. New agendas for IEL teaching in India (and indeed for other developing countries), must derive from and support domestic 'reform' objectives. The ideas in Karl Polanyi's 'The Great Transformation' and in John Ruggie's work on embedded liberalism are useful for imagining, defining and mapping the meaning of 'reform' for India. These ideas provide language and concepts for contestation and debate over substantive meanings and outcomes of 'reform'. They also embrace notions of meaningful societal participation in the processes of both the definition and implementation of 'reform'. IEL teaching in India must more actively engage with domestic issues arising on account of the liberalization of India's external trade as well as the liberalisation of its domestic economy. Even broader agendas for IEL teaching in India can be found within reform discourses that extend beyond economic reforms into bigger questions about reform of governance in India, with corresponding implications for constitutional law, federalism, reconstructions of meanings and structures of governance, and in their broadest sense become questions about negotiating and defining the social purpose of domestic governance and of providing adequate delivery systems for such governance. By packaging different reform discourses together, IEL courses could enable the creation of new knowledge, the development of new discourses, and the creation of new capacity as well as space for useful social, political, constitutional, and legal activity. As part of arguing the case for more IEL teaching, efforts are required to broaden the audience or market for IEL knowledge, and increasing 'demand' for IEL would be an important component. IEL teaching in India might usefully develop an inward looking focus, by engaging more with issues and problems confronting the domestic political economy. It must also develop new issue linkages between competing substantive values, competing interests, and substantive outcomes and procedural mechanisms. In doing so, IEL teaching would contribute towards constructing a more inclusive redefinition of the 'problem-space' of reform in India.

Teaching international economic law in India