Carolyn Deere Birkbeck clearly took on a considerable challenge when she assumed the job of compiling this diverse collection of essays by developing country authors who would like to see changes in current global trade governance. Motivated (in her own words) by a concern that ‘scholarly discussion of the governance of global trade and institutional reform of the World Trade Organization (WTO) (and indeed of the global economy more broadly) is dominated by developed country scholars and opinion-makers’ she has drawn together views from twenty-eight developing country authors on their priorities for reform. The proposals of these contributors range from revised approaches to trade negotiations; to improving the inclusiveness of trade policy development; to new forms of special and differential treatment; and, to legal amendments to the WTO's dispute settlement understanding. While the editor suggests that the book outlines a distinct set of priorities for global trade governance reform, I do not believe all readers of these essays would reach the same conclusion.

The international trade economists of my acquaintance would all maintain that the greatest gains to national economic welfare result from a reduction of a country's own barriers to international trade and a reform of the internal market to ensure it is competitive. A number of the contributors to this book argue for dramatically increased national policy space for developing countries as a ‘reform’ that would contribute to development. One author challenges the Dispute Settlement Understanding as an anti-development tool and proposes a ‘national deference principle’ as the standard of review that should apply in disputes involving developing countries (although it is unclear whether this proposed standard of review would apply in the case of South–South disputes). Several of the authors suggest changes to the rules governing international trade negotiations and/or new constraints on the behavior of WTO's developed country members, but it is not apparent how the changes they suggest would be governance reforms that ‘work for development’.

It is not necessary for me to review all of the contributions contained in this book given that the editor provides a very good summary in her introductory chapter and, in any event, it would be difficult to analyze twenty-eight authors in the space allowed for this review. As a consequence, focus is placed on what I consider to be the more notable chapters and proposals.

Carlos Primo Braga and Olivier Cattaneo discuss accession to the WTO as a development issue and make some very good arguments in support of the need for reform of the accession process. They point out that based on an analysis of the past 25 accessions, market access demands have become more difficult, ‘WTO-Plus’ conditions have been placed on new members and limited account has been taken of the specific problems of acceding countries. They maintain that LDC accession guidelines have not been followed in practice and that there is no apparent solidarity between developing country incumbents and new members (with the former willing to see the latter burdened with greater obligations than they accepted themselves). I would agree with the authors that it is not development friendly to force new members to accept obligations they cannot implement and that there is a need for a different approach to capacity-building – especially help with implementation.

The pros and cons of WTO members' approach to decision-making have been the focus of many critiques in the past. Faisal Ismail and Brendan Vickers write in favor of consensus decision-making and maintain that the ‘single undertaking’ approach to negotiations is good for developing country members of the WTO, provided that the negotiating agenda is unbiased. They express a concern that new ‘plurilaterals’ in the system would create a two track system and while I agree with this point, I do not see how that would be much different from the system, as it exists today with special and differential treatment for a large number of categories of developing countries. The authors usefully suggest that the WTO should adopt the Sutherland Report's recommendation on strengthening the consensus principle by requiring objecting governments to justify their position as a matter of vital national interest. Another useful recommendation is concerned with the formalization of coalitions as the bargaining principals in a two-step negotiating process. Formalizing these groups would make the conduct of negotiations easier to manage and more transparent than the increasingly ad hoc approach being followed in Geneva. I disagree with Ismail and Vickers when they argue for a code of conduct for WTO chairs and suggest that in some cases it would be desirable to use supranational chairs drawn from the Secretariat. These proposals are unnecessary and would not be justifiable in any event on development grounds.

Miguel Rodriguez and Marie Wilke have a different view of the single undertaking and argue for a move to à la carte negotiations and the abandonment of all-encompassing rounds. They support a ‘critical mass’ approach to negotiations, subject to some conditions that would help to ensure that the result of the negotiation contributes to the achievement of development objectives. Critical mass agreements should have an ‘opt-out’ procedure so that any interested party could participate if the subject was important to them and should only be launched after an explicit decision by all WTO members that the negotiation should proceed. In addition, Rodriguez and Wilke hold (in my view, quite rightly) that critical mass agreements should not be permitted to result in changes to the ‘acquis multilateral’ – which should only be modified by collective agreement.

South–South coalitions at the WTO are the focus of the essay written by Vicente Paolo B. Yu III. Unfortunately, this author makes quite a few assertions that he fails to back up with evidence. Coalitions of developing countries in negotiations may be desirable from the standpoint of building solidarity in the Third World, but because of the approach he's taken to his subject Yu cannot convince this reviewer that South–South coalitions have made a real contribution to development objectives at the WTO. Some examples are in order. Yu says that systemic economic and political imbalances in global trade policy and trade governance favor developed countries, but he does not give us any hint as to the nature of these imbalances and how they are fixed by South–South coalitions. He asserts that the Brazilian-led G-20 has been successful in merging the defensive and offensive interests of its members and that developing country negotiating positions are ‘supported by a solid body of research and data analysis’ but I do not think this would be supported by the Indian position on special safeguards in agricultural trade.

The most unusual contribution to this book comes from Bhupinder Chimni, who writes from a ‘Marxist perspective’ (footnote 2 on page 262). He claims that every actor is unhappy with the WTO and that the organization exists ‘to sustain the global capitalist order to the advantage of an emerging transnational capitalist class whose interests are articulated by powerful States’. By this point in the narrative, readers would be right to wonder what kind of contribution this Marxist might make to improving governance in the WTO. Among his proposals are to amend Article 52 of the Vienna Convention to ban the use of political or economic pressure in negotiations (just how would that work in practice?), and require an ‘active consensus’ in WTO decision-making (isn't the ‘passive consensus’ approach difficult enough?) He is also the author who suggests incorporating a ‘national deference principle’ as the standard of review in dispute settlement cases involving developing countries (how would a wide-open exemption from the rules of WTO contribute to development?).

In the face of so many different ideas, it is quite an undertaking to educe the main themes of these essays and to determine how they relate to reforms that might work for development. The editor deserves much credit for her effort, in a final concluding section of the book, to draw together the many divergent priorities and proposals and to place them in a broader context. Deere Birkbeck tries to show how proposals from across the book can be grouped into four thematic areas.

Her first theme places global trade governance in the context of global economic governance and highlights a range of trade agreements and arrangements as well as economic, social, and environmental regimes that impact development. The second theme examines expectations about the roles and responsibilities of developing countries in trade governance. The third theme looks at proposals for strengthening multilateralism in ways that would benefit developing countries. The fourth theme looks at proposals for improving the fairness of trade negotiations.

Although the editor does a good job of trying to relate many of the very large number of proposals into these themes, I think readers of this 682-page volume will be tempted to segregate the proposals according to whether the effect of their adoption and implementation would be (a) to make trade governance work for development (the stated objective of the book) or rather (b) to increase developing countries' individual and collective power and influence at various negotiating tables. Many of the proposals advanced by contributors to this book fall into the latter category and would have the effect, over time, of increasing developing countries' policy space by moving them away from the applicability of rules and norms of the multilateral trading system that has served the global economy well over more than six decades.

I accept that there are areas where the WTO and trade governance could be improved to work for development and there are good proposals along these lines in this book, some of which I have highlighted above. However, unlike the Marxist author of Chapter 10, I don't accept that all actors are unhappy with the WTO.