By Mark Halle, IISD Trade & Investment Director

Since 1998, IISD has been providing support to developing country research and capacity development on trade and sustainable development issues. This support is broadly regarded as having been successful. It has contributed to strengthening the southern voice on trade and sustainable development such that the debate at the WTO is now far more balanced than it has ever been in the past.

Southern research and policy development in fields relating to trade and sustainable development have expanded and improved in quality. There are more centres researching these topics, they are better distributed throughout the developing world, and the results of their research find a much stronger voice in multilateral trade policy circles, as evidenced by the many sustainable development-related “offensive interests” presented by developing countries in the WTO. And the research covers a far broader scope than heretofore –not simply clustered around a small range of “hot button” issues, but covering the range of concerns that link trade policy with wider social and environmental values. While the TKN is not responsible for this shift, it has contributed to it.

The results of this shift are encouraging:

• The commitment to sustainable development found both in the Preamble to the Act that established the WTO and in the mandate for the present Doha Round of multilateral trade negotiations, once regarded as a vague statement of intentions, has been taken out, dusted off, and is now regarded as the expression of a real goal towards which the trading system must advance.

• When the Doha Round was named the “Doha Development Agenda”, many developed countries regarded this as no more than a hortatory expression of intent. In six years of negotiation, they have learned that most developing countries intend to hold them to their promise.

• Trade and environment, until recently a topic many developing countries did not wish to see in the WTO, is now an issue for negotiation and the links between the trade rules and the international environment regime are assuming ever more importance.

When IISD launched the TKN, our contention was that sustainable development would not advance in the trading system unless it was demanded by both developed and developing countries. That is now beginning to happen.

IISD assessed progress in the TKN after the first three years, and undertook a serious review of lessons learned after the first six years, in 2004. A further cycle of TKN work undertook some experimentation, including regional projects, open calls for proposals, small grants to young researchers, etc. This involved breaking the mould of fixed, formal partners and reaching out to a broader constituency, varying according to the issue chosen. While this yielded good results, it departed from the traditional TKN approach in ways that resulted from managerial innovation rather than strategic thinking.

Starting in 2007, ten years after its inception, the third phase of the TKN will concentrate on building more autonomous research networks in each of the three focus regions and communicating the results and insights of the work to decision makers in a compelling and constructive way. Regional coordinators have been established in three focus regions; South America, Southern Africa and Southeast Asia allowing for a much more interactive relationship between network partners.

The evolution of our understanding of the link between trade and sustainable development suggests that a key factor is how regimes interact, how issues migrate, and how our institutions evolve to deal with the new realities. The emerging issue of investment and its policy impact has been seen as an essential addition to the scope of TKN during this third phase.