In Whose Interests? Transparency and Accountability in the Global Governance of Food: Agribusiness, the Codex Alimentarius, and the World Trade Organization

2009 ◽  
pp. 93-123 ◽  
Author(s):  
Elizabeth Smythe
Keyword(s):  
World Trade Organization ◽  
Global Governance ◽  
World Trade ◽  
Codex Alimentarius ◽  
The World ◽  
Transparency And Accountability

Perpetual Peace or Perpetual Process: Global Civil Society and Cosmopolitan Legality at the World Trade Organization

2003 ◽  
Vol 16 (4) ◽  
pp. 673-699 ◽  
Author(s):  
RUTH BUCHANAN
Keyword(s):  
Civil Society ◽  
World Trade Organization ◽  
Global Governance ◽  
World Trade ◽  
Global Civil Society ◽  
Theoretical Approaches ◽  
Perpetual Peace ◽  
The World ◽  
History Of ◽  
Preceding Discussion

This article argues that a contemporary form of ‘cosmopolitan legality’ serves as an animating force behind contemporary practices of global civil society and global governance. The first part provides an account of the recent history of civil society engagement with the World Trade Organization. It observes that civil society groups have focused their collective efforts on issues relating to procedural legitimacy, including accountability, openness, and transparency, potentially to the detriment of efforts to bring about more fundamental change. In the second part of the article, various theoretical approaches to cosmopolitan legality are discussed, including their claimed Kantian origins, and are mapped on to the preceding discussion of the place of a global public sphere in global governance. Programmatic approaches that purport to mobilize cosmopolitanism in the service of either a political or legal project are ultimately rejected, and a provisional alternative reading is suggested.

scholarly journals How to solve a crisis of legitimacy?

2014 ◽  
Vol 23 ◽  
pp. 133-146
Author(s):  
Anne Reiff
Keyword(s):  
Civil Society ◽  
World Trade Organization ◽  
Global Governance ◽  
World Trade ◽  
Analytical Tool ◽  
Public Forum ◽  
Empirical Results ◽  
The World

Who participates in the discourse of legitimation taking place in the WTO Public Forum and how do the participants evaluate the World Trade Organization (WTO)? This paper offers two empirical insights into the phenomenon of Global Governance. Firstly, the discourse of legitimation is analyzed with a quantitative text analytical tool. Secondly, as the framework of the discourse is a forum founded by the WTO to start dialogue with civil-society after the crisis of legitimacy in the 1990s, it sheds light on a strategy of Re-legitimation. The empirical results show that (1) the discourse in the forum is “emptying-out” as NGOs are largely replaced by Academia and national politicians and (2) that it is limited by power inequalities between the actors.

Overlap Management in the World Trade Organization: Secretariat Influence on Trade-Environment Politics

2010 ◽  
Vol 10 (2) ◽  
pp. 54-79 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sikina Jinnah
Keyword(s):  
World Trade Organization ◽  
Capacity Building ◽  
Global Governance ◽  
World Trade ◽  
Document Analysis ◽  
Knowledge Brokering ◽  
Recent Scholarship ◽  
Combining Data ◽  
The World ◽  
The Way

This article builds on recent scholarship that explores the nature of secretariat influence in global governance. By combining data from interviews with WTO delegates and secretariat staff with document analysis, this study examines how the WTO secretariat is shaping trade-environment politics by using its bureaucratic authority to influence overlap management in the WTO. This study argues that secretariat influence is present, but varies in form across cases. It shows up in the forms noted by previous scholars in their examinations of UNEP secretariats (i.e. negotiation-facilitation, capacity building, and knowledge-brokering), but also in previously un-discussed forms of influence such as marketing convention norms, and litigation facilitation. It further argues that secretariat influence matters in that the WTO secretariat plays an important role in shaping the way trade-environment issues evolve within the WTO, shaping its own identity as a hybrid administrative-judicial organ, as well as in enhancing WTO legitimacy with the broader public.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document