The Song Remains the Same: The role of Civil Society in the North American spp Process

International negotiations involving trade rules and regulatory harmonization continue to be dogged by questions over transparency, legitimacy and effectively, popular democracy. Analytically, the older “club model” of multilateral negotiations has been delegitimized by a process of “complex multilateralism,” that permits the inclusion of perspectives from a wide range of civil society organizations. However, the trilateral process that created the the Security and Prosperity Partnership of North America (spp) between the three nafta states has resisted this trend towards expanded political opportunity by decentering the process of trilateral (and bilateral) negotiations, and shifting the center of decision-making power toward bureaucratic structures that are resistant to democratic accountability. Instead, in the post-September 11 context of heightened security concerns, the spp process has restricted the forms and opportunities for citizen engagement and deliberation about the future of North American integration. A powerful network of political and economic actors has crafted a narrow vision of a post-September 11 economic and security space at the expense of other civil society actors (non-business). In this paper, we examine the constrained multilateral political opportunity structure in the North American region by documenting the unequal opportunity structure for consultation available to business as opposed to non-business civil society actors within the spp process, as well as legislative actors