Regime Management as Everyday Practice: Exploring Background Knowledge and Interpretive Activity in Multilateral Trade Governance

Research on international organisations has increasingly explored how bureaucracies, knowledge-based networks of experts, and diplomatic practice make social reality ‘legible’ and governable by engaging in distinct classification and framing activities. Existing theoretical approaches, however, still encounter difficulties in explaining this epistemic construction of world politics in situations where power-based international bargaining interweaves with highly technical and legalised debates. My paper addresses this conceptual and empirical challenge by exploring the role of trade experts in the proceedings of selected committees in the World Trade Organization (WTO). The implementation and monitoring activities in the committees remain under-explored in the literature, even though, cumulatively, they reify processes of contestation and legitimisation and thereby determine the trade regime’s continued relevance for domestic policymaking and commercial exchange. The legal provisions and accepted principles that constitute the multilateral trade regime are rarely unambiguous or readily applicable to real-world trade concerns. Consequently, these rules should not be portrayed as an ‘objective’ structure that can be understood in clinical isolation, but need to be interpreted in light of the intersubjectively shared background knowledge of those who live by them. This interpretive work, which classifies the world economy into enforceable trade issues, is often conducted within the WTO committees between member state representatives and officials of the WTO Secretariat. It reflects individuals’ subjective beliefs about how trade is and should be organised, but is primarily based on intersubjective frameworks of meaning and shared, routinised patterns of (inter)action that allow actors to collectively make sense of the issues at hand and, in turn, enable them to continuously reproduce the trade regime. This paper investigates the routines and specific background knowledge that allow committee participants to arrive at a shared understanding of particular trade issues. Relying on textual analysis and expert interviews, I show how the interpretive activity within two WTO committees defines both the collectively accepted basis for interaction and the epistemic boundaries of the trade regime. To achieve this, I investigate the taken-for-granted knowledge and interpretive dispositions of those who inhabit the regime as well as the conditions and effects of their use. By comparing the interactions within two key committees dealing with (i) trade and development and (ii) technical, regulatory barriers to trade, I expose differences in how arguments are made, disagreements are framed, knowledge is generated, and ideas and worldviews are legitimated in the WTO on a regular basis. In short, I argue that in order to explain the continued relevance of the trade regime, it is crucial to understand what frameworks of meaning are employed by committee participants in their interpretation and appreciation of social reality and, even more importantly, how these frameworks are collectively produced, internalised and maintained over time.