Global Trade Governance and WTO: Beyond the Model of the Club

Abstract

Global governance primarily focuses on the management and governance of global affairs that are beyond the ability of the state to solve through formal and informal interactions between local, national, regional, and international actors. The post-cold war era can be called the golden age of the process of global governance. This process has significantly broadened to include more diverse players, networks, institutions, regimes, and mechanisms that apply distributive or regulatory functions that have transnational effects. In parallel with this the global trade governance, which includes the group of bilateral, regional and multilateral international agreements, at times with the institutions that regulate the international rules concerned trade, has widened significantly in the 19th century and onward. The evolution of the WTO is corresponding to these essential changes in the order in global trade governance. Therefore, this article examines the effect of the process of global governance on the WTO and the evolving factors of change in the nature of this organization. According to the author's argument, growing role of the civil society organizations, the redistribution of power, opposition to free trade, the proliferation of preferential trade, differences in the views on goals and functions, have led to the fact that, the nature of the WTO has shifted from the cluster of developed countries to a global organization.