Taking Stakeholder Engagement in International Policy-Making Seriously : Is the WTO Finally Opening-Up?

In the face of multiple global challenges, in many IOs major policy-making initiatives are under way. In the last two years alone, the WHO started negotiations on a pandemic treaty, the UN kicked off talks on a plastics pollution treaty and the WTO is engaged in ground-breaking initiatives on topics ranging from e-commerce and investment facilitation to plastic pollution and fossil fuel subsidies. In all of these talks and discussions, a central question is how to fairly and effectively engage external stakeholders. While lagging behind for decades, the WTO has also woken up to the potential of more actively engaging stakeholders in international trade policy-making, both to make better policies and mitigate implementation challenges. This contribution describes the ground-breaking steps taken in a number of Member-led informal discussions and dialogues: the Trade and Environmental Sustainability Structured Discussions (TESSD) and the Informal Dialogue on Plastics Pollution and Environmentally Sustainable Plastics Trade (IDP).The objective of this contribution is to describe and applaud recent developments and initiate a discussion on how the process can be made more inclusive and robust and, potentially, also be extended to formal WTO activities.In this context, the WHO’s ongoing negotiations on a new pandemic treaty are used to offer an interesting point of comparison