Regulatory Depoliticization

Mega-Regional Economic Integration & Human Rights  

This project focuses on processes of depoliticisation in regulatory infrastructures. It does so by mapping the sites of technocratic governance and depoliticisation embedded in the future TTIP and/or CETA regime complex and, contextually, to identify existing and potential space for repoliticisation. These so-called ‘megaregionals’ establish regulatory institutions, which can profoundly shape domestic regulatory system and further contribute to the ongoing process of technocratisation. This project aims at better understanding what are the sites and legal techniques through which this process is realised and what are the interests privileged and those marginalised. At the same time, the project aims at studying the space for repoliticisating public issues. In that regard, the value and potential of participatory rights are investigated among other avenues for repoliticisation or (re-)juridification. Standards on participation may pose different questions to trade and economic growth developments like TTIP including:

1. can it be argued that, though the ways these developments come about, participatory rights have been breached (and if so what does that imply for future globalisation-driven regulatory infrastructures)?:
2. do regimes like TTIP/CETA allow for a remedial function for participatory rights either (within or outside the regime)?;
3. how would participatory rights need to be conceptualised (within or outside the regime) in order to be effective?

Hence, included in the objectives of this project is to formulate novel approaches to public participation that exploit those same technological and regulatory infrastructures that foreclose traditional forms of public participation, and to reflect on the legal basis of such remedies from an international law perspective.

Organisers