Reform of the World Trade Organization (WTO) has been an almost constant refrain since its creation in 1995. The same issues return time and again, unresolved and more wearisome with each cycle. Dispute settlement has faltered, decision-making has become unwieldy, and rules have lagged behind the needs of a global economy transformed by digitisation, climate imperatives, and disruptive technologies. None of this is new, but what makes reform urgent today is the environment in which these failings need addressing.
The WTO now operates in a world where geopolitics has become sharper and geoeconomics more pervasive. The United States (US) has reached for tariffs and unilateral measures over multilateral rules. China has expanded state-led industrial policies that many see as distortive. Russia’s war on Ukraine, and the sanctions and countermeasures it provoked, have unsettled alliances and fractured markets. In both Europe and Asia, governments have turned to security, climate, and regional agreements as insurance against uncertainty. Supply chains are being restructured, subsidies expanded, and security invoked to justify intervention. Confidence in multilateralism has eroded, widening the gap between how trade is governed and how it is practised.
In June 2025, WTO members decided reform could not be postponed any longer. The General Council asked Ambassador Petter Ølberg of Norway to facilitate a process aimed at meaningful outcomes. He organised discussions into three areas: governance, fairness, and what he has called “issues of our time”. The latter addresses how decisions are made and legitimacy sustained, whether trade delivers its benefits fairly, and how the system engages outwardly with climate change, economic security, and digital transformation. The ambition is to place concrete proposals before ministers when they meet in Yaoundé in March 2026 for the WTO’s 14th Ministerial Conference (MC14).
The agenda has structure and purpose, but it also has weight. Each strand shoulders grievances that have persisted for decades. Together, they risk burdening reform with more than it can bear. The danger is once again mistaking process for progress.
Politics complicate matters further. Washington has long argued that dispute rulings curtailed its ability to defend domestic industries, that WTO rules failed to discipline China’s state-led practices, and that consensus blocked movement on newer priorities such as digital trade. These concerns have been raised repeatedly yet rarely taken seriously. Other members dismissed them as self-serving or destabilising, reluctant to erode bargains on adjudication, development, or inclusiveness. The result has been mounting US frustration, with grievances left to harden and disengagement deepening.
Yet US dissatisfaction is only part of the story. Europe has pressed for tougher rules on subsidies and greater clarity on the trade–climate interface. India and Brazil continue to argue that agriculture remains unfairly skewed. China treats many reform demands as attempts at containment. Many developing countries stress that commitments to fairness remain unfulfilled, while least-developed country members highlight barriers to market access and their limited capacity to defend their interests in the system. These frustrations—long-standing and widespread—reinforce the impression of an organisation unable to deliver where it is most needed.
Still, the WTO matters, especially for smaller and poorer economies. Its rules anchor trade policy, provide leverage in disputes, and counterbalance the asymmetries of bilateral bargaining. No member has left. The US—though critical and often disengaged—has not abandoned the system entirely and still turns to it selectively. Sustained absence of US engagement would leave the WTO a diminished organisation and deepen the drift already visible in its functioning, unless members collectively find ways to restore purpose and momentum.
Governance remains the system’s unresolved knot. Consensus gives every member a voice, but it has also entrenched paralysis. Reform will be difficult without loosening this constraint, yet consensus itself can only be changed by consensus. This circularity haunts the organisation and now shadows the Ølberg process.
The prospects for meaningful reform are slim. For reform to carry weight, the US would need to see value in it, but even then, others may not accept the terms. The result is a conundrum—an organisation paralysed by consensus that must find consensus to change itself.
If progress comes, it will be modest. It may mean restoring a dispute settlement system that commands enough trust to give rules credibility. It may mean plurilateral agreements embedded within the WTO in ways that are open and non-exclusionary. It may mean rethinking fairness so that it resonates with workers, communities, and those in the informal economy as much as with markets.
The larger challenge lies beyond Geneva. Trade is already being transformed by climate policy, digital innovation, and the politics of security that run through supply chains and investment. The risk is that reform circles familiar ground while the world moves on without it.
The Ølberg process will be judged not by the breadth of issues it entertains but by whether it can show credible progress. A fully engaged United States would strengthen the system, yet the organisation’s future cannot rest on Washington alone. The WTO’s relevance will depend on whether others—Europe, emerging powers, and coalitions of smaller states—choose to invest in keeping it alive and making it fit for the world as it is rather than the one in which it was created. The difficulty is that the burden of old disputes, fractured politics, and continued US disengagement makes the prospects for material reform slim. Without unusual political will, reform risks once again confusing process with progress, leaving the organisation intact in form but adrift in purpose.
* Rorden Wilkinson is Professor of International Political Economy and Deputy Vice-Chancellor (Academic) at Macquarie University, Sydney, Australia
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