Decision-Making by Consensus in the WTO
Decision-making processes are among the most important methods of functioning against which the legitimacy of one institution may be rated. It is because they show how the organization treats its members and thereby fulfils the first and minimal level of accountability. Moreover, in the recent trend of international fora, especially the WTO, decision-making by consensus has become popular. This characteristic of the WTO makes it considerably and significantly different from other international institutions such as the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank (WB), where decisions are based on weighted voting. In the WTO, consensus based decision-making is popular, while voting is possible and/or mandatory only in some special cases. In voting process, each member state has one vote and therefore allowing equal status to all members irrespective of trade shares or general economic size. The principle of equality of voting status of member states is clearly seen in the formal structures of the WTO. The top body of the WTO is the Ministerial Conference, which meets every two years. The day-to-day workings of the WTO are carried out by the General Council. The General Council also meets in the guise of the Trade Policy Review Body and the Dispute Settlement Body (DSB). Below the General Council are the Councils for Goods, Services and Trade Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS), along with Committees that report directly to the General Council. Representation at all three levels is open to all members of the WTO. The provisions stipulate the use of consensus and voting in the WTO covered Agreements will be examined in the first section. The advantages and disadvantages of consensus are the core discussion in section 2. On the one hand, consensus in decision-making offers developing countries with equal voice with their developed partners irrespective of trade shares and economic sizes. On the other hand, from the viewpoint of developing countries, they have to face a lot of disadvantages deriving from the consensus based decision-making. Finally, in order to help WTO become the most democratic, efficient, transparent and legitimate organization in promoting international trade, some recommendations about the reform of the WTO in the field of decision-making are raised.
How to Begin to Think About the ‘Democratic Deficit’ at the WTO
There is an increasingly widespread intuition that the World Trade Organization lacks adequate democratic legitimacy, or has a “democratic deficit” to use an expression derived from debates about the European Union. Views on the issue of the WTO and democracy range from the dismissal of the “democratic deficit” based on the notion that since the WTO rules are approved by national governments they must be democratic or adequately so, to claims that the WTO along with other institutions and actors of globalization as essentially destroyed democracy as we have known it (Noreena Hertz). Despite the intensity with which the issue of democracy and the WTO is contested there is essentially no literature aimed at bringing analytical clarity to the problem. As Susan Marks notes, democracy itself “is a hugely contested concept”. In other work, I have identified a range of conceptions of “democracy” that is at play in debates about democracy and governance beyond the nation state, including representative democracy, deliberative democracy, corporatist or consociational democracy, republican or communitarian democracy, and democracy as decentralization. All of these views of democracy have salience in determining democratic legitimacy, and they are in important ways inter-related. For example, while representative
Regional strategies for the minerals industries of the states of the SADCC
The SADCC has been in existence for eleven years but little progress has been made in regional coordination of the minerals sector even though this sector is the most important exporter of the region. There is however scope for minerals development at the regional level.