Interestingly, the group operated at the level of senior officials from capitals and provided an opportunity to improve coordination of policies between the national capitals and Geneva. It has been the contention of many Realist/ Neo-Realist theories of International Relations that process is merely the handmaiden of structural power. Precisely how developing countries can choose their allies, on what terms and in what coalition types form the subject of an independent enquiry.59 What is noteworthy here is that even WTO officials, in contrast to the studied refusal of GATT officials to acknowledge the existence or advantages of coalition formation, see coalitions as an important tool that developing countries can use to improve their participation in the WTO and thereby also enhance the democratic workings and legitimacy of the institution. The first such issue is democracy within the WTO. Finally, recognition that there are some serious problems with even the relatively democratic decision-making processes of the WTO is the first step towards the goal of more effective participation of developing countries in the WTO. This book examines the different aspects of law within the WTO and how the developing countries are reacting to the Doha Developmental round, which took place after the September 11th … III.3 Burden of Increased Transparency: Overloaded Agenda and Capacity-Building. While sections III and IV focus on the content and implications of institutional reform, section V suggests strategies that developing countries can adopt to make optimal use of existing WTO decision-making procedures and the informal method of institutional functioning. Schott, Jeffrey and Jayashree Watal, Decision-Making in the WTO, International Economic Policy Briefs (00-2), Washington DC: Institute for International Economics, March 2000. PROBLEMS WITH WTO DECISION-MAKING PROCESSES: VIEWPOINT OF DEVELOPING COUNTRIES. In other words, executive bodies, if they are to meet the participatory requirements of all or most WTO members, would need to be re-constituted according to the councils and committees, and further with negotiations in each sub-sector as interests of countries are re-aligned. Even the excluded members of the WTO recognise the importance of flexibility of agenda and small group membership in reaching consensus among 142 members. Finally, amendments, if they cannot be reached by consensus, generally require two-thirds majority. But within this broad agreement, two sub-groups are notable. Over 80 developing countries wanted WTO to waive patent rights in an effort to boost production of Covid-19 vaccines for poor nations.. Read more at straitstimes.com. If a similar situation were present in a domestic political system, i.e. 50 | However, recent meetings in Mexico and Singapore in the lead up to the Fourth Ministerial Conference, amongst a select number of countries, often referred to as ‘super green rooms’, call into question any commitment towards increasing transparency and inclusiveness. However, even this decisive vote was not used for the actual decision-making process to bring services within the purview of the GATT. Membership of the General Council is open to representatives from all its members. To negotiate these technical issues effectively, the presence of qualified personnel with expertise in the area under negotiation is often essential. Besides working on their individual capacity and Geneva presence, the second way of improving the participation of developing countries in the WTO is by their bargaining together, i.e. This question is addressed using a comparative and historical perspective. This would suggest a decisive and workable majority of developing countries, given the system of one-member-one-vote in contrast with the weighted voting that is used in the IFIs. II. The EU has proposed a body along the lines of the Consultative Group of Eighteen. Research Fellow, St. John’s College, Oxford University Using voting procedures could help in curbing some of the adverse spillovers of the consensus principle. The mechanism is the result of 40 years of experience and the evolution o… 13 | Note that the conscious and good-faith efforts by developing countries to enhance their participation in the WTO allow us a better measure of the efficiency and equitability of WTO decision-making procedures, as opposed to the times when developing countries maintained a sullen refusal to participate in the ‘Rich Man’s Club’ of the GATT and then criticised its decision-making processes for being opaque and exclusionary. The WTO Agreements contain provisions which give developing countries special rights. Other developing country members argue that the problem is not so much unequal representation of nationalities as much as ideologies, whereby only certain kinds of professionals are recruited, eg. Some scholars have noted that some developed countries effectively use these meetings to pressurise developing countries into accepting new obligations that they are ill-prepared and unwilling to accept.30 Perhaps if developing countries had adequate time between two ministerials, they would be better able to stave off these pressures and also participate in the ministerial with a positive and specific agenda. In the absence of such legitimacy, Prague, Seattle and Genoa are the obvious consequences. Taking into account the number of disputes where developing countries are implicated, the above mentioned resources are simply inadequate. As such, it reduces the transaction costs that derive from multiple bilateral deals and also minimises bilateral arm-twisting by establishing a system of rules and norms of inter-state behaviour. As such, it differs considerably from the international financial institutions (IFIs) i.e. The role of these informal processes is recognised even on the WTO website -- ‘Informal consultations in various forms play a vital role in allowing consensus to be reached, but they never appear in organization charts… They are necessary for making formal decisions in the councils and committees.’10 Informal consultations operate at each level of decision-making of the WTO. For instance, in the IMF, the voting power of member countries is determined by the size of their respective quotas, where quotas are a function of their weight in the international economic system. Developing countries, even if present at the meetings, are often reduced to watching from the sidelines, as their small delegations are unable to make the informed choices that can present a match for the preparations of the developed countries. For instance, the US put such threats to effective use in the Uruguay Round by brandishing the alternative of regional arrangements to which the Americans would resort if services were not included. 51 | Rege (2000) arrives at a similar conclusion -- ...the higher management would generally discourage publication by the secretariat of any papers that express views that go against the negotiating positions of the major players. In the long run, moreover, it would not enhance the credibility of the WTO as an international institution if host countries -- developed or developing -- use their position to structure the Ministerial to their own advantage and at the exclusion of other members, and there is no guarantee that such situations will not arise again. But this recognition comes with two attendant risks. Third, even members that gain a place in such a board might not have the resources or the will to negotiate in all the different areas that a permanent body would demand. http://www.wto.org/english/docs_e/legal_e/final_e.htm, http://www.wto.org/english/thewto_e/secre_e/intro_e.htm, http://www.wto.org/english/thewto_e/whatis_e/tif_e/org1_e.htm, http://www.wto.org/english/thewto_e/minist_e/min99_e/english/about_e/resum01_e.htm. The shift to opposing the hard-line and re-alignment with the Café au Lait by the Southeast Asian countries, was also collective, under the umbrella of the ASEAN. Second, while the tentative schedule for formal meetings for the year is put up on the WTO’s bulletin board, informal meetings (often by their very nature) are still more ad hoc and are called at much shorter notice. This paper limits its enquiry to the issue of internal transparency and addresses proposals of institutional reform from this angle in the next section. Deeper structural reform (e.g. It is not surprising that some developing countries feel that the staff can best provide them with information on meetings which they have been unable to attend and also prepare them for forthcoming issues. While the principle of one-member-one-vote and possible representation by all members -- strong or weak -- in all levels of the organisation suggest a high degree of egalitarianism that would work in the interest of developing countries, it is interesting to note that developing countries themselves show little evidence of having utilised the power of majority votes. Clearly, formalising blocking by allowing majority voting would only heighten the frequency and possible implementation of such threats. Section II discusses the problems that developing countries have with these processes. While the original problems with decision-making remain, their significance and urgency have increased in an unprecedented way, given the far-reaching mandate of the WTO and the opportunities and constraints it presents. An understanding of the technical details, political compromises, trade-offs and cross-issue linkages is necessary to enable effective participation in the final decision-making process. The concerns raised above are relevant not only to the WTO but also any IO, and boil down to the question, even with the best intentions, can IOs ever act as neutral brokers? As it was in the Green Room that consensus was negotiated, which was then presented as a fait accompli in the formal meetings, exclusion proved especially costly. Rather than avail themselves of their large numbers in agenda-setting in the GATT, developing countries in fact chose to express their demands in other fora such as the United Nations General Assembly and the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD). It is within this backdrop, that the question of decision-making processes becomes an especially urgent one, for the only hope that developing countries have of working this elaborate and powerful system of rules is through active participation in the rule-making and rule-enforcement processes of the WTO. First, process, in itself, in the form of rules and procedures (formal or informal), is a key determinant of the substance of power politics. The workability of these proposals is assessed and, where necessary, alternatives are advanced. The immediate implications of such expanded powers would also be far from paltry. While capacity-building is at least as much a domestic issue as an international, institutional one, it has attracted considerable attention in the light of technical assistance programmes of the WTO. In a recent study, it has been pointed out, ‘Whereas the Director-General previously had always been an official, with the creation of the WTO the job has come to be filled by politicians.’48 The controversies surrounding the appointment of the current and previous DGs are too well known to require elaboration here. The built-in agenda, notification requirements and so forth mean that developing countries already have their plates quite full, without needing to add the extensive preparatory work that has to be put in before the Ministerial. In its eighth discussion on the topic since it was first raised in October, the WTO’s TRIPS Council spent three hours debating, but failed to agree. 1 for countries like Bangladesh to 6 for India. the marginalised member states of the WTO) vs. them (NGOs which tow the line of the developed countries by introducing labour and environmental issues and deflecting attention from the issues that are of importance to developing countries). Second, the decision to grant a temporary waiver to a member country from WTO obligations requires a similar three-fourths majority of the membership of the Ministerial Conference (Article IX:3). WORKING PAPERS 11, WTO Decision-Making and Developing Countries, This working paper was written by Amrita Narlikar *, The discussion in the preceding pages has only reinforced this point: not even the most well-intentioned and adequately funded technical assistance programmes can be completely free from the influence of the great powers and their agenda. In pursuing its objectives of promoting South solidarity, South-South co-operation, and coordinated participation by developing countries in international forums, the South Centre has full intellectual in-dependence. First, there is a danger that preoccupation with procedural reform will deflect attention from issues of substance -- a luxury that neither the Secretariat nor developing countries can afford. The General Council also meets in the guise of the Trade Policy Review Body and the Dispute Settlement Body (DSB). The threat of the six Latin American members of the Cairns Group at the Montreal Mid-Term Review of the Round was effective because they had shown themselves to be enthusiastic members of a bridge-building, mediating coalition. In cases where overlaps are inevitable, some interesting proposals have been put forth about establishing either joint panels 52 or a superior referral body.53 However, we are already in the realm of the speculative and long-term. For a brief description of these coalitions, see Narlikar (2001). Another possible line of reform would be to evolve a hierarchy of issues with different methods of decision-making applying to each level. Further, the experience has shown, that if any official persists in pursuing approaches, that in their view are in the interest of countries with weaker bargaining positions, but not favoured by the major players, the latter build up pressures through complaints to the higher management and require them to shift them to other assignments.’. III. Limiting the mandate, however, also means a better distribution of responsibilities outside of the WTO, i.e. The point, while valid, does not address the contradiction between the two sets of decision-making procedures. Canada, for instance, has proposed a new committee with limited membership, comparable to the UN Security Council in regional representation and rotation of non-permanent members. In fact, NGOs might be one of the few forces that can provide a balance against the corporate lobbies that sometimes drive the agenda of the WTO through the influence they exercise on the developed country governments. In recognition of this, Chairmanships are in annual rotation and attention is paid to achieving some regional parity in appointments.11. Unfortunately, as this paper has argued, there is little in the record of the WTO (or any other IOs, for that matter) to assure one of this neutrality. For instance, the provision of one-member-one-vote is not enough. In any case, more effort needs to be made to resolve most of the contentious issues in Geneva, before the Ministerial -- the extent of disagreement among all the major powers at Seattle contributed in no small way to the failure of the Ministerial and also dented the credibility of the WTO process. The key phrase here, however, is ‘if carefully and strategically used’ and as has been illustrated in the previous pages, reform of rules of the WTO can only go so far without destroying some of the benefits of the system. There is no question about either my right as the chair to do it or my intention as the chair to do it.’ Transcript, WTO Press Briefing, US Trade Representative Charlene Barshefsky (et al), World Trade Organization Conference, Seattle, Washington, December 2, 1999. The numbers have only increased in the run-up to the fourth Ministerial conference. First, so far the WTO has put at the disposal of developing countries only two experts in the field working part time and two junior staff members to help these countries with their disputes. The Ministers in Doha, at the 4th WTO Ministerial Conference mandated the Committee on Trade and Development to examine these special and differential treatment provisions. This new round is meant to focus on the needs of developing countries. Krasner, Stephen D., Structural Conflict: The Third World Against Global Liberalism, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985. The staff officials are the only insiders to some informal meetings, besides the countries themselves who have managed seats in the Green Room for the particular negotiation. Since then, the engagement of the GATT/ WTO with domestic regulatory policies has persisted and increased with the expansion of the GATT agenda through the Tokyo Round codes on technical barriers to trade and government procurement. The text of these working papers may be reproduced without prior permission. One or two countries are assigned to deal with each issue, for a minimum duration of one year. In addition, by bargaining together, developing countries occupy greater weight in terms of trade shares and political clout and can hence exercise more influence than when they bargain alone. As such, it is doubtful if they would be sufficiently representative of the region/sub-group. However, the Like-Minded-Group (LMG) has noted that increased transparency, particularly through means such as open-ended meetings after the small group meetings, would increase the number of meetings that the already over-taxed delegations will have to attend. Currently, if a country does not raise its objections in the stage of consensus-building, it can do little else but accept the decisions that it is presented with in the final stage and is told that it cannot object in such a late stage of decision-making. The remaining WTO members acceded after first becoming WTO observers and negotiating membership. International institutions can be viewed in two perspectives. Hence, somewhat paradoxically, perhaps one possible explanation of more active participation by developing countries in the WTO, despite continuing problems with decision making processes, is the enlarged sphere of the organisation that is enforced through the Single Undertaking and a binding dispute settlement mechanism. First, several proposals have been advanced to deal with the problem of large numbers in the consensus-building process through the creation of an Executive Board. All quotes delayed a minimum of 15 minutes. The developing countries made strong requests in the process before the Seattle Ministerial of 1999 and the Doha Ministerial of 2001 that the implementation issues be resolved as a matter of first priority in the sequencing of the WTO's future activities. While the one-member-one-vote ensures that developing countries, at least formally, share an equal voice with their developed counterparts, irrespective of trade shares, the rule of taking most decisions by simple majority also offers a considerable potential advantage to developing countries.