NAMA Negotiations, WTO Regime and Emerging Countries Institutional Preferences. The Dialogical Preference Hypothesis

This working paper deals with institutional change. It will argue that change in the balance of power due to the rise of new trading powers does not lead to a fundamental discontinuity in the WTO regime. This last one might evolve but it has more staying power than generally thought. The WTO regime as a complex but flexible institutional framework facilitates compromises which consolidate the regime's fundamental goals and constitutive obligations but also contests regulatory instruments and measures. I show that the the institutional offer of emerging economies use this WTO regime's property. This leads to a dialogical institutitonal offer: a contestation of the operational mechanisms and instruments and adherence to the norms and principles. The emerging economies' institutional offer is dialogical in the sens that it is characterized by both competition-cooperation between preferences and interests related to the complexity of the WTO's liberalization-regulation agenda. The emerging state actors' dialogical institutional offer in an institutionalized framework is related to the process of institutional adaptation to the distributional conflicts which in turn is related to multilateral trade compromise and to the state of international political economy contradictions.