“World Trade Organization Reform” is the headline issue at the 14th Ministerial Conference, but what does it mean, and what are we likely to see?

Behind the slogan of World Trade Organization (WTO) reform lies a complex set of debates about how the organization makes decisions, how its rules shape competition between economies, and how well it serves development priorities. As members prepare for the 14th Ministerial Conference (MC14), expectations are modest, but the choices made now could shape the WTO’s future for years to come. 

Debate about reform of the WTO usually means two things: reforming the WTO as an organization (i.e., its principles, procedures, and practices), and reforming the set of multilateral treaties administered by the WTO (e.g., related to agriculture, trade in services, trade-related intellectual property rights, etc.), that govern much of global trade, including the balance of obligations within those treaties between richer countries and poorer ones. 

Governments have long-standing gripes on all of these issues, and long-standing pressures, combined with the economic and political turmoil of the last year or so, have forced discussion into the open. Over the last few months, a discussion process led by an appointed facilitator, Ambassador of Norway to the WTO Petter Ølberg, has managed to group the wide range of concerns and complaints into three buckets: 

• decision making
• how the rules should set a level playing field between economies
• how the rules should protect, and advance, development priorities 

These buckets reflect the topics on which there is the most convergence, but some members remain uncomfortable with elements of each bucket, and others would like additional topics discussed. 

Decision Making (or the Lack Thereof) and Consensus at the WTO 

Decisions at the WTO are, by practice, taken by consensus, which at the WTO means the lack of objection to a decision, not unanimity in its favour. But over the last few years, objections have become more and more common, stymying both procedural and substantive progress. For instance, members who have wanted to negotiate rules on new topics (e.g., e-commerce and investment facilitation) have gone ahead and done so, and have now agreed “plurilateral” texts of treaties on both topics, with the obligations in each treaty applying only to those participating. They have asked for agreement from all other members to have the treaties incorporated into the WTO’s legal framework, which has not been possible due to the opposition by several members (i.e., a lack of consensus). 

Within the “decision-making” bucket, then, exist two related challenges: the concern that the practice of consensus is being used to prevent some members from moving ahead on issues that are priorities for them, and the risk that allowing sub-sets of members to move forward could sideline issues that matter to others, while also leading to a more fragmented set of global rules. There are also worries that members block even procedural decisions for tactical reasons. Creative options that have been raised as possible ways forward include giving members the ability to “opt in” or “opt out” of certain decisions, or developing different procedural rules for different kinds of decisions. 

How should WTO rules change to “level the playing field” between economies? 

Within the “level-playing-field” bucket are concerns about what rules governments should be subject to, rather than how they are agreed. 

The current system of rules curtails government interventions that distort the global market for goods and services. But pressures on those rules have been rising. Some have been sudden. In 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic made it clear that, overnight, large parts of the global market could simply grind to a halt, and governments intervened heavily—sometimes in ways not aligned with the WTO rules—to keep economies and livelihoods afloat. However, the system seems to have passed that stress test as members recognized the unprecedented and one-off nature of the crisis. A much greater challenge has arisen in the last year, which has seen the United States’ imposition of tariffs against other WTO members that run counter to the key WTO principle of non-discrimination among members, as well as the U.S. commitments to agreed tariff levels. This has left other governments feeling they are fighting a trade war with one hand tied behind their backs; to retaliate effectively, they feel they need to raise tariff levels beyond the limits they agreed back in 1994. 

Other pressures have been building for decades. The scale of the Chinese government’s investments in education and infrastructure, and its direct involvement in the private sector, has led to many developed and developing country governments protecting their own businesses to avoid complete dependence on a manufacturing giant they do not entirely trust. Those with the money compete with subsidies. Those without the money compete with local content requirements and import or export restrictions in an effort to build local capacity. 

The other key long-term pressures are technology and climate change. Adapting to and mitigating climate change requires changes to economies that governments need to lead. In doing so, governments also want their own businesses to benefit from the growth of the new low-carbon economy. Simultaneously, data is becoming a key resource endowment, with processing capacity shaping a country’s ability to add value, both to services and to physical goods. Where data describes the behaviour of individuals or critical national systems, governments can and should shape how that information can be used. 

Finally, an internal source of pressure since the very beginning of the WTO, has come from many developing and least developed countries, who point to imbalances that favour developed countries in several agreements (for example, the agreement on agriculture, the agreement on trade-related aspects of intellectual property rights, etc.) negotiated during the Uruguay Round. These countries have been demanding that these imbalances be fixed so that the rules support truly mutually beneficial trading relationships among all WTO members, developed, developing, and least developed. 

Many governments feel the WTO rules governing how they respond to these pressures are too constraining, or simply out-of-date and unclear. Some feel they are too lenient. Almost all of them want them to be updated and “fairer.” The challenge is that fairness is in the eye of the beholder. One country’s intervention to support a struggling firm and secure a domestic supply of important machinery is, to another country, a trade distortion that costs its businesses market share and its local economies jobs. The WTO rules were set, back in 1994, to balance similar considerations. The question is how governments re-balance the rules to respond to new policy pressures. Ideas for the way forward here include changes to rules on state subsidies and investment, for example, and or to the remedies governments can use when they feel others’ policies are damaging their interests. 

Where does development sit in the reform of the WTO? 

That rebalancing cannot pretend that all economies are starting from the same point. Here is where the third “bucket” of reform discussion becomes crucially important: how should the current work of the WTO—and any new rules—be shaped to protect and advance the interests of developing countries? 

Debate has focused on the concept of “special and differential treatment,” (S&DT) that is, the different treatment that developing country members of the WTO enjoy under WTO treaties. This treatment includes longer timelines for the implementation of new commitments, technical assistance to help with reform work, and sometimes a different level of commitment altogether compared to developed country members. 

The concerns in this bucket are both about how well existing S&DT works and how differential treatment in future rules should look. Some governments argue that S&DT is too wide, covering some very large and competitive developing countries and should be based on the specific needs of a narrower group of members. Others argue that special treatment is an inherent right linked to a member’s (self-determined) status as a developing country and see the solidarity that comes from large developing countries enjoying S&DT as crucial to its continuance for smaller members. Creative options for ways forward include the idea of more targeted differential treatment, with targeting being based on specific policy challenges or specific members: China has already signalled it will opt out of using S&DT in future agreements, for example. 

There are also many links between the development debate and the level playing field: some developing governments see the current rules as too constraining and want more space to support industrialization as part of development plans, for instance. Others see the rules as too narrow and unable to discipline the many sophisticated ways governments distort markets to support their own businesses. Underlying all of these issues is the question of trust: many members feel that the current system of rules is tilted in favour of more powerful countries. As trade policy is increasingly used by those same powerful countries to achieve both economic and political ends, the playing field seems to be tilting even further against smaller players. 

In the lead-up to MC14, WTO delegations will be meeting continuously to develop a 2-year work program on these issues that ministers can endorse. These weeks are important. If members remain trapped in the effort to dominate the work program and exclude others’ priorities, the opportunity to build some fragile trust to begin this conversation will be lost. On the other hand, if they can develop a balanced work program in which all members can see their priority issues reflected and which their ministers can endorse, that will be a success. 

MC14 should not be expected to provide solutions to the complex challenges to the WTO’s current functioning and agreements. But it can and should agree on a balanced work program to address these challenges to lay the foundations of an honest and constructive conversation among WTO members about a new set of rules to play by. 

This article draws from a longer piece the author published in October 2025: What You Need to Know About WTO Reform.