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Domestic Politics and the Search for a New Social Purpose of Governance for the WTO: A Proposal for a Declaration on Domestic Consultation

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.