New Agendas for International Economic Law Teaching in India: Including an Agenda in Support of Reform

Abstract

This paper argues that at this time of India's ongoing 'Great Transformation,' legal educators and researchers in India need to pay greater attention to international economic law, and that a renewal of the approach to teaching IEL, could provide significant contributions to both the objectives and outcomes of 'reform' in India. New agendas for IEL teaching in India (and indeed for other developing countries), must derive from and support domestic 'reform' objectives. The ideas in Karl Polanyi's 'The Great Transformation' and in John Ruggie's work on embedded liberalism are useful for imagining, defining and mapping the meaning of 'reform' for India. These ideas provide language and concepts for contestation and debate over substantive meanings and outcomes of 'reform'. They also embrace notions of meaningful societal participation in the processes of both the definition and implementation of 'reform'. IEL teaching in India must more actively engage with domestic issues arising on account of the liberalization of India's external trade as well as the liberalisation of its domestic economy. Even broader agendas for IEL teaching in India can be found within reform discourses that extend beyond economic reforms into bigger questions about reform of governance in India, with corresponding implications for constitutional law, federalism, reconstructions of meanings and structures of governance, and in their broadest sense become questions about negotiating and defining the social purpose of domestic governance and of providing adequate delivery systems for such governance. By packaging different reform discourses together, IEL courses could enable the creation of new knowledge, the development of new discourses, and the creation of new capacity as well as space for useful social, political, constitutional, and legal activity. As part of arguing the case for more IEL teaching, efforts are required to broaden the audience or market for IEL knowledge, and increasing 'demand' for IEL would be an important component. IEL teaching in India might usefully develop an inward looking focus, by engaging more with issues and problems confronting the domestic political economy. It must also develop new issue linkages between competing substantive values, competing interests, and substantive outcomes and procedural mechanisms. In doing so, IEL teaching would contribute towards constructing a more inclusive redefinition of the 'problem-space' of reform in India.