ABSTRACT
Trade politics is the result of the complex and dynamic interdependencies and interrelations between state and society. Its outcome cannot be predetermined from a set of economic or political structures. Structural and rational accounts of trade policy offer important insights into the behaviour of actors, whose interests are taken as being objectively, materially and exogenously given, when trade agendas involve tariffs and market access and thus have unambiguous distributional costs and benefits. However, they offer few clues as to why state-society relations exhibit different dynamics across trade negotiations. In other words, a question that remains open is why preferences and strategies vary in South-South, North-South and WTO negotiations as domestic actors attempt to respond effectively to the increasing depth of the agendas at stake and the uncertainty of policy outcomes. The framework used in this book spotlights dimensions of trade negotiations that should be considered in order to understand fully how and why domestic actors respond differently to international trade agendas.
