Description
International Political Economy (IPE) scholarship on the World Trade Organization (WTO) has focused on high-level negotiations and formal dispute settlement. This has obscured the important day-to-day work done in the organization’s many committees, which continues despite the current Appellate Body crisis. Public health scholarship shows that member challenges to health promotion policies in bodies such as the Technical Barriers to Trade (TBT) Committee can have a chilling effect on regulation. While drawing attention to this neglected dimension of global trade governance, public health scholarship has tended to see policy space as fixed and subject to the production of sufficient evidence. This paper challenges this interpretation by bringing the study of localised, evidence-based practices to the IPE of trade. A novel theoretical framework combines insights from International Relations scholarship on diplomatic practice and public policy work on evidence-based practices. This framework informs the analysis of a new dataset on challenges to public health measures at the TBT Committee and data from interviews with Geneva-based practitioners. The paper identifies the main evidence-based practices found in the Committee and highlights how these reflect tacit, but contestable norms regarding legitimate knowledge and expertise. While practices are patterned, there is room to reshape them – creating more space for the interpretation of WTO law.
