The WTO Dispute Settlement System

The proposed goal-based approach, which ties effectiveness to goals, requires an in-depth inquiry into the question of what aims underlie the World Trade Organization (WTO) Dispute Settlement System (DSS), the spectrum of functions it should play, and the nature of the relations between them. The present chapter maps these multiple aims as prescribed for the DSS by its mandate providers while probing their complementary and contradictory relationships. In so doing, the chapter lays down the substantive building blocks of the WTO DSS’s goal-based effectiveness framework against which the system’s performance is to be evaluated. In analysing the DSS’s goal structure, the chapter begins with the system’s ultimate ends—the overarching purposes the DSS is expected to fulfil in the long-run—which frame the broad mission it is designed to achieve. It then follows with the system’s more specific, intermediate goals, those which serve as means for realizing the former, more general, open-ended objectives.