Governing 'As If': Global Subsidies Regulation and the Benchmark Problem

Abstract

As a result of the extraordinary work of Foucault, Shapin and Schaffer, Porter, and many others, we are familiar with many of the practices of governance which emerged during the 19 th century at the intersection of the modern social sciences and the modern state, as 'naturalised' knowledge of an objectified social body formed the foundation of specific kinds of social and political order. But over the course of the 20 th century, critiques of objectivity have become commonplace, and a post-positivist epistemological revolution has taken root in many quarters. How, then, have practices of governance-through-knowledge modified themselves in response to a century of such critiques? This paper takes inspiration from the work of Jasanoff, Riles, Latour and others, to identify a mode of 'governing as if': a pragmatic mode of governance which works not through the production of objective knowledge as the shared epistemic foundation for political settlements, but rather by generating knowledge claims that stabilise social orderings precisely through their self-conscious partiality, contingency and context-dependence. This argument is developed using the illustration of global subsidies regulation in World Trade Organization law, focussing in particular on the knowledge practices by which particular conceptions of 'the market' are produced and deployed in the course of its operation. The paper argues that the standard criticisms of naturalised economic conceptions of the 'free market', developed in various scholarly traditions throughout the 20 th century, do not provide an adequate account of economic governance working in 'as if' mode, either positively or normatively. It further argues, following Riles, that such regimes of governance derive their effectiveness fundamentally from their 'hollow core', and that it is in the constant and active work of 'hollowing out' that we are likely to find their characteristic modalities of power and underlying structural dynamics.

Beyond evidence: Anticipatory regimes in law

“…6–12), law undertakes “ingenious operations,” invents “brilliant expedients,” and creates “necessary fictions” so that it can come to faster and more stable conclusions than would be possible if it were to depend solely on the accumulation of hard scientific facts. Specific legal techniques include the introduction of “placeholders” that offer provisional solutions to potential problems by treating ambiguities as already determined (Riles, 2010), and rules and procedures that govern “as if” the world matched our models (Lang, 2014).…”

Reflexive institutional reform and the politics of the regulatory state of the south

“…The infrastructure for reflexive reform rests on particular expert “goods” – methods (or who decides what counts as data), creativity (or who decides what counts as an innovation), and deliberation (or who decides what counts as meaningful interlocution). These structures may privilege particular political ideas, but their means of doing so remain undertheorised from practice (see, for initial efforts to do so, Lang 2014; Johns 2019). Political reflection : while reflexive reform is nominally open to political reflection and contestation, its infrastructure could function to block meaningful political reflection.…”

‘The wide and the narrow gate’: Benchmarking in the SCM Agreement after theCanada–Renewable Energy/FITRuling

“…20 See, e.g., Bigdeli (2014) that mainly analyses the law and politics of the localization element of the FIT. 21 Lang (2014). subsidy, in other words, is only ever defined for a specific purpose and relative to a particular context. 22…”