Description
Free trade agreements take years of ongoing work to produce. In multilevel governments, like Canada and the UK, the substate governments participate in these negotiations through consultation and advocacy work, and often in conjunction with the other substate governments. For example, Canadian provincial governments send delegations to each negotiation and meeting. Subsequently, these delegations have become very familiar with each other sharing toilet, cigarette, and dinner breaks.
Because trade policy decision requires state-level governments to make trade-off decisions—often between supporting one industry, sector, or provincial, over another—substate-level delegations recognise that they may win/loose in these decisions. Ergo, the pretext for the substate delegation participation, is that that they are competing for their preferences, sectors, and industries to be represented in the final text. However, despite this undercurrent of competition, I bizarrely observed not conflict or competition in the substate-substate relationship, but instead that these officials have developed highly productive, open, friendly, and trusting relationships.
Based on my doctoral ethnographic-informed research with the ten Canadian provincial trade policy teams from 2021-2023, I ask the following questions. How does shared time and space help in developing friendly and trusting relationships even in the high-risk context of trade negotiations? What do the shared material spaces afford and how do they help to nurture these productive working relationships? What can this tell us about how to support productive, friendly, and trusting intergovernmental relations in other contexts and jurisdictions?
This research contributes to scholarship on international political economy studies by providing an empirical case study of how provincial governments work together to inform trade negotiations, as well as methodologically by showing how focusing on the material environments of policymaking can help us to understand the spaces and places in which trusting relationships can be nurtured.
