After having seen both the potential effects of transparency under the SPS and TBT framework and the limitations that still remain as to their actual benefits to all Members, Chapter 9 will examine the main ways forward to improve the system. These recommendations focus on what the WTO Members on the one hand and the WTO Secretariat on the other can do to improve the effectiveness of transparency, with the ultimate goal of improving the day-to-day implementation of the SPS and TBT Agreements, preventing disputes or allowing better disputes if they must take place. The recommendations are structured around improving availability of information on all Members’ domestic regulations, to all Members and to private stakeholders and on enhancing the scope and benefits of regulatory co-operation.

A good decision-making process includes a series of steps based on logic and common sense that helps you understand and address the complexities of your decision. The intended product of this process is to provide insight to make better-informed, and therefore better, decisions. A value-focused decision-making process to make high-quality decisions consists of six components. The three front-end components state the decision problem or decision opportunity that you face, identify your values for that decision to clarify what you want to achieve, and create alternatives that contribute to achieving your values. A high-quality front end has a much greater influence on making a better decision than the back end, which describes the consequences of the competing alternatives and evaluates the desirability of those alternatives. This book concentrates on the three front-end components. Several procedures for identifying values and creating alternatives are described in detail and illustrated in several case studies and examples. Your objectives and the set of alternatives for your decision statement provide the basis for a precise description of your decision, referred to as a decision frame.

Training and development serve as important mechanisms through which organizations can prepare employees for the future of work. This chapter outlines implications for training, including how extant research can inform future interventions and how these approaches might adapt to account for technological, demographic, and behavioral shifts in the workplace.

This chapter analyzes how work and employment are shaped within a landscape marked by organizational innovation and, more often than not, even by the fundamental transformation of formal organizations. Even large organizations are increasingly adopting what some have called “post-bureaucratic” forms. The post-bureaucratic organizational landscape is marked by three trends with the aim of achieving even more fluidity in organizations: temporariness, plurality, and partiality. With regard to these three aspects, we argue that work and employment, often intermediated with the help of agencies of all sorts, are increasingly integrated in networked processes of interorganizational value creation.

Many writings on the changing nature of work portray the employee–organization relationship as a casualty of the modern workplace. This chapter reviews social exchange models of the employee–organization relationship as captured in organizational support and psychological contract theories. We explore the evidence of the extent to which the employee–organization relationship has changed as a result of changes in employment practices over the past several decades. Our analysis considers both overall trends in the employee–organization relationship as well as specific issues tied to temporary and part-time work, independent contractors, tripartite employment relationships, job insecurity, job hopping, and income inequality. The evidence suggests that while certain employment practices threaten the quality of the employee–organization relationship, social exchange models provide useful and relevant frameworks through which to understand the nature of these changes and employees’ reactions to them.

The SPS and TBT Agreements set obligations to rationalise the development of behind-the-border measures in WTO Members. Because of the myriad of domestic measures that may fall under these disciplines, a detailed understanding of domestic measures and their rationale is essential to ensure effective implementation of the two Agreements. The SPS and TBT transparency frameworks allow all WTO Members to gain the necessary information and reach such an understanding. This chapter makes an in-depth presentation of the transparency requirements of the SPS and TBT Agreements and the potential role they may play in both informing Members and allowing them to exchange on their policies at an early level of the regulatory process. It defines the purpose, scope of application and typology of transparency mechanisms that exist under the frameworks of the two Agreements.

Discussions of the changing nature of work would be incomplete without a consideration of the changing role of the private sector in sustainable development, which affects what companies are working toward and how they are accomplishing their aims. This chapter considers and illustrates how the private sector can contribute to the accomplishment of the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Opportunities for impact extend beyond traditional forms of Corporate Social Responsibility. Enabling companies to embed people-friendly, planet-sensitive policies and practices in ways that are good for business can propel the positive transformation needed to achieve the SDGs. This leads to questions of how to create such enabling environments. Answers require a keen understanding not only of businesses, but of the people who lead, comprise, and support them. As such, the behavioral and organizational sciences are key to facilitating the kinds of private sector contributions necessary to accomplish the SDGs.

Part III shows that even for trade conflicts that do not get solved in bilateral or multilateral dialogue, transparency is still an essential ‘complement’ to dispute settlement: transparency is often used in addition to formal dispute settlement procedures, either before, in parallel or after the proceedings have finished. Indeed, the SPS and TBT transparency mechanisms facilitate access to information and foster dialogue for all Members alike, thus providing equal access to understanding about domestic factual and legislative contexts behind trade frictions. If tensions persist, transparency can support Members in having the necessary information to raise and defend disputes. In parallel, discussions in STCs at the margins of formal dispute settlement can continue to serve as a basis for Members to work towards a mutually acceptable solution.

Jagdish Bhagwati refers to transparency as the ‘Dracula effect’, saying that ‘exposing evil to sunlight helps to destroy it’. Does transparency under the WTO Agreements on the Application of Sanitary and Phytosanitary Measures (SPS Agreement, or SPS) and on Technical Barriers to Trade (TBT Agreement, or TBT) ensure a ‘Dracula effect’, helping to prevent and address WTO-inconsistent practices? Or does it fuel more disputes? In other words, does transparency act as a substitute for or a complement to dispute settlement – or both?

This chapter gives an overview of the disciplines regarding international regulatory co-operation that exist in the SPS and TBT Agreements. It argues that to complement the transparency obligations of the two Agreements, a number of provisions encourage WTO Members to engage in regulatory co-operation, that can take place either bilaterally or multilaterally in the context of the WTO. This regulatory co-operation that is both encouraged by the SPS and TBT Agreements and enabled by the Committee meetings takes place at the early stages of the domestic regulatory process regarding trade-related measures, and is an essential complement to both the substantive obligations presented in Chapter 1 and the transparency obligations presented in Chapter 2. Indeed, together, these different legal disciplines of the SPS and TBT Agreements allow Members to understand better each others’ regulations and participate directly in each others’ regulatory processes, thus ultimately preventing disputes from rising.