Politics, risk management, World Trade Organisation governance and the limits of legalisation

Abstract

The regulation of risks and the devising of appropriate institutional structures to democratise expertise rank high on the agenda of international governance. The potential of the European Union to cope with these challenges seems superior to that of the World Trade Organisation (WTO). The WTO institutional set up is still largely dominated by inter-executive multilateralism and leaves little scope for transnational deliberative policy formation. When confronted with conflicting risk policies, the WTO should therefore not try to adjudicate such conflicts; it should rather search a middle ground between politics and law.