Secretariats, or a permanent management structure, play a critical role in the delivery and implementation of international agreements including trade deals. They provide the backbone to administer the day-to-day functions of keeping such pacts alive and ensuring that parties stick to their obligations. Secretariats come in all shapes, sizes and levels of formality. Running an institution by informal committees alone can be a recipe for allowing members to shirk their implementation commitments. It is highly likely that many of the benefits of trade agreements will go unrealized. Countries in the region are signing on to a host of often overlapping free trade agreements (FTAs), creating a so-called “noodle bowl” effect in trade parlance; but a number of them have no permanent structures in place to monitor the agreements. Almost a year after entering into force, the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP), despite having provisions requiring the creation of a Secretariat as the very first order of business, has yet to set up one.

The WTO Baseball League, if you will, was created by 24 teams but quickly expanded. It gradually added more teams, who created more and more rules under a process of collective decisionmaking. The specifics of the game were clarified by both formal and informal processes, so teams and players understood what behaviors were acceptable and which were considered problematic. The position of the umpire or referees was also given greater prominence and additional rules as the decades went by. The entire League underwent a substantial transformation in 1995, with the introduction of an expanded set of rules, more clarity on the roles of the umpires, and even greater attempt to provide consistency across the game. The League was rebranded to reflect this change in emphasis. But cracks were already starting to show. While the approval of rule changes by consensus worked well in the early days, by the time of the rebranding exercise, the League included 76 teams. The total number of teams has now ballooned to 164 with more waiting to join. Trying to get approval from all for new activities has become impossible. Teams started discovering the power of the consensus rule and simply avoided allowing players to take the field at all. This has dramatically slowed the ability of the League to even hold games at all—often keeping play from happening for months or years on end. While the WTO Baseball League has a head and a set of staff dedicated to supporting the game, the chief has limited power as the teams hold all the control. As with real baseball leagues, there are some teams that are richer or more powerful than others. Some teams are barely competitive at all. The fan base or audience for WTO Baseball has also dwindled. There have been various proposals for ways to attract fans back into the seats, including additional outreach, marketing and PR. There has even been some tinkering with solutions to provide outcomes tailored to a subset of teams. Given the lack of innovation taking place in the game, many teams discovered that there were alternative venues for playing baseball. They started joining other Leagues and tweaking the rules. All are playing baseball, but the conditions and the rulebook vary.