Participation of Civil Society in EU Trade Policy Making: How Inclusive is Inclusion?

ABSTRACT

In response to growing contestation and politicisation of trade policy, policy makers have aimed to enhance the ‘inclusiveness’ of trade policy through the institutionalisation of deliberative forums in which civil society organisations participate. However, it is not clear whether these processes actually enhance inclusiveness. This article adds to our understanding of this question by, first, developing an analytical framework (the ‘inclusiveness ladder’) and, second, applying it to the civil society mechanisms (CSMs) of European Union (EU) free trade agreements. The unique feature of CSMs is their focus on ensuring that the actual implementation of trade agreement does not run counter to sustainable development principles. Specifically, our empirical research involves a mixed methods analysis of primary and secondary sources and a survey of civil society participants. We find that CS is largely included at the level of logistics and partly at the level of information sharing, whereas monitoring capacities remain limited and impact on policy-making is quasi-absent. Moreover, results suggest differences between business participants, who seem largely satisfied with the lower steps on the ‘ladder’, and non-governmental actors who insist on policy impact. Finally, we outline avenues for further research and reflect on policy implications.

KEYWORDS:

• Trade
• sustainable development
• civil society
• inclusiveness
• European Union

Acknowledgements

We would like to express our gratitude to Deborah Martens, Lore Van den Putte and Myriam Oehri, who contributed to the design of the original questionnaire in 2016, and to all respondents of the survey and interviewees for generously sharing their insights with us. We are very grateful to the editors of the special section for their continuous support and very valuable comments, as well as co-organizing a roundtable and authors’ workshop at the United Nations University – CRIS in October 2018 and a roundtable and conference at the Université Sorbonne Nouvelle in November 2019. We have benefitted from the valuable feedback from the participants of the aforementioned events, as well as ISA conference in March 2019, where an earlier draft of this paper was presented, from the three anonymous reviewers, and from Austin Ruckstuhl, Niels Gheyle and Thibaut Renson.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Some respondents participate in more than one DAG. The N of business and non-business representatives was respectively 14 and 27 in 2016, and 5 and 26 in 2018. While CSMs also do exist on the side of the partner countries, including their members in the survey was not feasible in the framework of this project because of uncertain status of many partner mechanisms and language barriers.

2 The CSM of the CARIFORUM agreement deviates from the general set up as there are no separate DAGs, only a single forum called Consultative Committee which monitors the entire agreement.

Additional information

Funding

This work was partly supported by the Vrije Universiteit Brussel (VUB) under Grant OZR/2017/092 (the GREMLIN Project).

Notes on contributors

Lotte Drieghe

Lotte Drieghe is currently employed as a Project Officer at the World Trade Organization and was a post-doctoral researcher at the Department of Political Science at Ghent University.

Jan Orbie

Jan Orbie is Associate Professor in European Union External Relations at the Department of Political Science at Ghent University.

Diana Potjomkina

Diana Potjomkina is a PhD student working on multistakeholderism in international trade and affiliated with Vrije Universiteit Brussel, Ghent University and United Nations University Institute on Comparative Regional Integration Studies.

Jamal Shahin

Jamal Shahin is part time Research Professor at the Institute for European Studies (Vrije Universiteit Brussel), part time Assistant Professor at the University of Amsterdam and Professorial Fellow at the United Nations University Institute on Comparative Regional Integration Studies.