Description
Thinking about the emergence of a negotiated free trade agreement (FTA) elicits images of heads of state shaking hands over a signed document. Yet, when one reads an FTA, it becomes clear that these massive, technical documents are likely the result of the work of a team of negotiators, technocrats, and officials. But who is involved in these processes is yet unknown, both at the central and devolved government levels.
Based on my fieldwork and interviews with officials from devolved governments, this paper progresses three interrelated ambitions: 1) to elucidate how one subcentral government trade policy team uses a policymaking technique of hub-and-spoke to help inform their policy preferences, 2) to show that there is a multiplicity of often invisible actors involved in the FTA negotiation processes, and 3) to argue that, ethnographic fieldwork adds value to understanding the situated environment of trade policy-making work and the policymakers whose doings and sayings contribute to FTA negotiations and implementation. In this paper, I ask: how do officials from this subcentral government identify their policy preferences and advocate for those preferences in the negotiation processes of a free trade agreement? Who is involved in the negotiation process in this context? And what are the everyday interactions that facilitate this work? As a result, this paper contributes to the growing use of ethnographic scholarship in IR locating the global in the local and vice-versa, and to international trade literature by expanding our understanding of who is included in the making of ‘the international’.
