Civil society organizations and democratic decison-making: Trade policy making from a nicaraguan perspective
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This thesis is an investigation of civil society organizations' (CSOs) involvement in free trade negotiations in a developing state context. Due to the rising popularity of participative forms of policy-making, new opportunities have emerged for civil society engagement in policy-making processes. The participation of CSOs in the formulation of free trade policy remains under explored in academic literature. This study seeks to contribute to this gap by exploring the participation of Nicaraguan CSOs in the formulation of the United States-Dominican Republic-Central America Free Trade Agreement signed in 2004. It finds that both internal and systemic barriers prevented CSOs from achieving desired policy outcomes in the final agreement. However the participation of CSOs in the negotiating process provided meaningful representation to excluded constituencies while helping to inform the negotiating strategies of trade officials. In this way, CSOs helped to improve the democratic nature of the proceedings. This demonstrates a potential advantage to the inclusion of CSOs in future free trade agreement negotiations.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.009 | 0.017 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.009 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.006 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".