Legalisation and privatisation in global governance: the case of WTO dispute settlement : Panel: New Actors and Approaches within Trade Politics

Global governance is in the literature understood in two inter-related ways: 1) as a series of institutions facilitating governance which exceeds the state; and, 2) as a societal contestation over what constitutes legitimate governance at the global level. As such, interest is in both the emergence and sedimentation of global governance, but also its contestation. Ideas about how to govern at the global level matter greatly since they provide the backbone of both the institutional sedimentation of contemporary global governance and the alternative models through which it is contested and will change.

In this paper, emphasis is placed on the dual operation of legalisation and privatisation as particular logics which both help define which ideas become constitutive of global governance. Legalisation and privatisation – as two particularly dominant logics for conducting global governance – are important, since they help frame the type of governance embodied within contemporary International Organisations. .

To understand what role these logics play, the paper will outline the logics of legalisation and privatisation in global governance and exemplify with the case of the WTO dispute settlement process. However, first it is important to consider how governance at the global level is made possible – that is where the authority resides – in order to appreciate the way the logics of legalisation and privatisation shape this form of governance.