How to organize for a trade negotiation

Once a decision has been made to enter a bilateral or regional trade negotiation how do you set about organizing the government for it?

Australian trade consultant Peter Gallagher has a checklist of issues to help think this through.  Parts 1 and 2 are available here: How to Prepare for FTA negotiations.  Part 3 is in preparation now available, and a fourth is in the pipeline.

Gallagher's annotated checklist works back and forth between the subjects that would be dealt with in a typical agreement, and their implications for organizing the government to pursue it: where to place responsibility for the negotiations, how to coordinate across government agencies, how to reach out to and involve the private sector and the legislature. He covers the area between the decision to enter the negotiations and the actual conduct of the negotiations. 

The checklist will be useful in capacity building workshops and interesting to anyone trying to understand FTA negotiations.

Some related web links:

Gallagher points to the Asian Development Bank report, How to Design, Negotiate, and Implement a Free Trade Agreement in Asia. 

The U.S. Government Accountability Office report An Analysis of Free Trade Agreements and Congressional and Private Sector Consultations under Trade Promotion Authority evaluates the operation of the provisions for public and congressional consultation mandated under the 2002 Trade Promotion Act.  I did a post based on the GAO report in January 2008: Congressional Input Into Trade Negotiations.

Gallagher, Low and Stoler, Managing the Challenges of WTO Participation.  45 Case Studies is online.  Several of the case studies deal with organizing for negotiations.  For example, Shihir Priyadarshi explains how India prepared an agricultural proposal for the WTO in 2001: Decision-Making Processes in India: The Case of the Agriculture Negotiations.

Minor edits later on March 7.

Comments

[Peter Gallagher]

Hi Ben,

Thank you for the referral (and for the additional references).

The third and final part of the series on preparing for an FTA negotiation is now up at petergallagher.com.au

[Peter Gallagher]

Oops... sorry, Ben, I was getting ahead of myself. The most recent post is Part III. There will be a fourth part on public/private collaboration in preparation of a trade negotiation.

Best,

Peter

[Naila]

hi, I would like to know if there are any documents talking about the private sector involvement in the FTAs, if so, could you please direct me to them?

Thank you

Naila

[Ben Muse]

Naila,

The post links to articles on how to organize within the government to pursue a negotiation. You can infer quite a bit about private sector involvement from the point of view of the government from them.

If you're more interested in how an industry group should organize itself influence a negotiation, I'd suggest getting in touch with Peter Gallagher (http://www.petergallagher.com.au/; [email protected]). He's worked in this area and written on the topic.

Ben