1 Civil Society Participation at the WTO – a Cure for its Democratic Deficit? Paper prepared for presentation at the 3rd ECPR General Conference, Budapest, 8-10 September 2005 – draft, please don’t quote without permission! Jens Steffek & Ulrike Ehling 1 University of Bremen Abstract In this paper we seek to assess whether the existing practice of civil society participation in the World Trade Organization (WTO) is mitigating its democratic deficit. The first section briefly presents our conception of ‘democracy’ and how we operationalized it for empirical research. We then use a parsimonious list of four criteria to evaluate a) the institutional framework for cooperation between governmental and non-governmental actors as it developed since the foundation of the WTO in 1994, and b) the de facto practice of cooperation between organized civil society and the WTO. Our empirical analysis is structured along the lines of various types of consultation and outreach activities that the WTO has organized in recent years to respond to the calls for more public participation in world trade governance. As for political content we focus on the trade-related aspects of the regulation of genetically modified organisms (GMOs) because it is a highly contested issue that mobilized all types of civil society organizations, from business lobby groups to advocacy NGOs. The conclusions that we draw from the general overview and the case study are ambivalent. On the one hand, the number of consultative mechanisms in the WTO has increased remarkably over time, as has the transparency of the formal policy-making process. On the other hand, we observe that these new mechanisms remain detached from the intergovernmental negotiation processes. Therefore, civil society actors have only a very limited chance to impact the formulation of policy proposals, and in fact, many of them do not even aspire to do so. They rather see their role in making the general public more aware of (and more sensitive to) the manifold consequences that WTO policies have on peoples’ lives all over the world. Dr. Jens Steffek Sonderforschungsbereich "Staatlichkeit im Wandel" Universität Bremen Linzer Strasse 9 A, Raum 2004 28359 Bremen, Germany Tel. +49 (0)421 218 8727 Fax. +49 (0)421 218 8721 http://www.staatlichkeit.uni- bremen.de/homepages/steffek/index.php Ulrike Ehling Graduate School of Social Sciences (GSSS) Universität Bremen Postfach 33 04 40 28334 Bremen, Germany Tel. +49 (0)421 218 8727 Fax. +49 (0)421 218 8721 http://www.gsss.uni-bremen.de 1 Research for this paper was funded by the European Commission, Contract No. CIT1-CT-2004-506392, Integrated Project NEWGOV. For more information on NEWGOV please see http://www.eu-newgov.org .