Trust, Mistrust and Functional Tolerance in WTO Decision-Making

This chapter examines the trust deficit within the WTO as a structural and institutional problem, demonstrating that trust is an operational condition for effective consensus-based decision-making. In recent years, a systemic trust deficit has embedded itself into negotiating practices. Consequently, a defensive negotiating culture has become the norm, where Members overinterpret minute details and assess proposals based on the identity of proponents rather than substantive merits, a dynamic illustrated by the strategic suspicion encountered during the author’s successful proposal to exclude non-violation complaints from the Agreement on Fisheries Subsidies. Rebuilding confidence requires design strategies operating across three interdependent dimensions of trust to institutionalize functional tolerance as the operational solution to strategic obstruction. Repairing interpersonal trust requires moving from informational transparency to intentional legibility. Stabilizing role-based trust requires behavioural predictability from chairs and facilitators. Managing systemic trust involves calibrated delegation, granting targeted, limited and reversible task responsibility to facilitators or the Secretariat while preserving ultimate Member control. The chapter argues, however, that the WTO does not require Members to achieve genuine political alignment or comprehensive mutual confidence. What it requires is a more limited but workable form of cooperation that may be described as functional tolerance, i.e., a willingness to refrain from defensive obstruction even when Members continue to disagree substantively or remain uncertain about one another’s longer-term intentions. In this way, the WTO can mitigate the “all-or-nothing” dynamic by enabling Members to withhold full endorsement while refraining from blocking collective progress, even in the absence of complete confidence in either process or outcomes.