Traditionally, almost everything about trade and investment negotiations is classified until the job is completed. In many countries even legislators are not allowed to see the work in progress until it comes to them for final approval. There is, however, nothing immutable about this traditional formula. It can be argued that that the better informed the public, and the more opportunities for public input, the better the final legislative result. In the case of trade negotiations, this argument is balanced against the value of secrecy to the process itself; it is hard to give away anything in a negotiation if the negatively affected parties are in the room.<\/p>\n
While governments are justifiably concerned about the influence of vested interests in trade policy, such interests usually find avenues of influence even in closed processes, and therefore the more widely the doors are thrown open the more the final outcome represents the views of the typically under-represented, including environmental and labour interests.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Traditionally, almost everything about trade and investment negotiations is classified until the job is completed. In many countries even legislators are not allowed to see the work in progress until it comes to them for final approval. There is, however, nothing immutable about this traditional formula. It can be argued that that the better informed… Read more »<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7,"featured_media":0,"parent":124,"menu_order":3,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":"0"},"class_list":["post-489","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.iisd.org\/toolkits\/sustainability-toolkit-for-trade-negotiators\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/489","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.iisd.org\/toolkits\/sustainability-toolkit-for-trade-negotiators\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.iisd.org\/toolkits\/sustainability-toolkit-for-trade-negotiators\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.iisd.org\/toolkits\/sustainability-toolkit-for-trade-negotiators\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/7"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.iisd.org\/toolkits\/sustainability-toolkit-for-trade-negotiators\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=489"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.iisd.org\/toolkits\/sustainability-toolkit-for-trade-negotiators\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/489\/revisions"}],"up":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.iisd.org\/toolkits\/sustainability-toolkit-for-trade-negotiators\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/124"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.iisd.org\/toolkits\/sustainability-toolkit-for-trade-negotiators\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=489"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}