Free trade agreements through a prism: exploring the making of trade policies from a subcentral government context

Free Trade Agreements (FTA) have become more complicated, complex, and progressive with deeper policy integration over time (Capling and Low 2010b; WTO 2011). Where early FTAs addressed at-the-border trade barriers, such as tariffs, contemporary agreements include non-tariff barriers and social policy obligations. Since the 1990s, FTAs started to include non-tariff barriers including labour, environment, transparency, and public procurement measures. These ‘deep’ obligations are found in most modern FTAs. The impact of the growing complexity and remit of FTAs is that they now include policy matters which are managed by subcentral governments and where they have ultimate jurisdiction on these policies, including in Canada and the UK (Melo Araujo 2017a; Kukucha 2015; 2003; Paquin 2013). As a result, these subcentral jurisdictions have been pulled onto the international stage because they have policy jurisdiction over many FTA obligations. Without formal policy levers at their avail, neither a seat at the negotiation table nor a pen to sign with, subcentral jurisdictions are shaping and influencing the outcomes of FTAs, albeit with varying degrees of success. How this is done and which actors are involved in these FTA policy-making processes is not well-known. My research explores this gap by following the making of the Canada-UK FTA negotiation process from the subcentral government context – with the Canadian provincial and UK devolved governments. To do this, I ask: From the subcentral government context, how are FTAs made and in what ways are subcentral government interlocutors involved in these processes? Theoretically, this research is positioned within the post-human new materialist paradigm leaning on Karen Barad’s (2007) Agential Realism and Bruno Latour’s (2005) Actor-Network Theory as the basis for the development of my Prism Approach. This research brings forward a discussion about the material complexities and nuances involved in the creation of these complex legal promises which occur in conjunction with additional becomings (e.g., trade negotiators, teams, and networks) through these cocreated processes. This research incorporated a multi-phased qualitative research design bringing together methods which organically fit with the research question and philosophical underpinnings. The five phases included: policy literature review, interviews with subcentral government policy professionals, series interviews with subcentral government policy professional key informants, participant observation case study of a devolved government trade policy team incorporating a social network analysis component, and two roundtable workshops bringing together the devolved and provincial government trade policy delegations. This research offers contributions to theoretical discussions building on Barad and Latour’s scholarship by reading them diffractively to generate my Prism Approach, and empirically by providing details of the making of an FTA highlighting the reasons why subcentral governments are involved, the processes involved in these negotiations, and an ethnographic case study of a devolved government trade policy team’s network of interlocutors.

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