What is your book about in a nutshell?
The rise of emerging powers has gone hand-in-hand with increasing conflict over the rules of global order. In The Unmaking of Special Rights, we examine an often forgotten aspect that results from these power shifts: conflicts over special rights for developing countries. In the wake of decolonization, many international institutions introduced measures to compensate those states in a disadvantaged position in the global economy. These measures – known as differential treatment provisions – have included exemptions from some rules, longer periods to implement legal agreements, and the provision of financial and technical assistance to developing countries.
But the rise of countries like Brazil, India, and China has increased pressure to adapt these arrangements to the new economic realities. This situation begs the question: At what point do countries cease to count as 'disadvantaged' in a given regime and thus cede their access to special rights? To this end, our book analyses how these special rights for developing countries have evolved in the context of global power shifts.
The universal provision of the same special rights to all developing countries – regardless of differences between them – has gradually been replaced by a more nuanced approach.
We find that the universal provision of the same special rights to all developing countries – regardless of differences between them – has gradually been replaced by a more nuanced approach. We focus each chapter on different policy areas undergoing this transition: common but differentiated responsibilities in the climate regime; capacity, willingness, and need in the health regime; and special and differential treatment in the World Trade Organization.
What is new about your findings?
In our book, we introduce a new focus to discussions on global power shifts and their implications. Increasingly, scholars and policymakers are dealing with the impact of China and other emerging powers on global governance. Indeed, these changing power dynamics are hard to ignore: for example, between 1990 and 2023, the combined GDP of countries in East Asia, South Asia, and the Pacific region rose from 22 to 33 percent of global GDP. And yet, commentary on these global power shifts is often framed around western-centric questions: What does this mean for a declining West? Is the liberal international order coming to an end?
These are certainly important questions. However, the shake-up of the global order has consequences beyond the West, including for the developing world. Here, our book adds to existing debates by shedding light on the implications of global power shifts for the evolution of developing countries' 'special rights'.
To our knowledge, our book offers the first comparative study of these rights across three distinct regimes – climate change, global trade, and global health. Zooming out, we identify three main trends: First, the system of differential treatment for developing countries is increasingly being reversed or unmade. Second, this unravelling of special rights for developing countries takes many different forms. Third, change is uneven and there are also pockets of resilience: In climate finance, for instance, developing countries have successfully defended the status quo and pushed for more special rights. Taken together, these findings illustrate the challenges that states confront in reforming differential treatment in the face of global power shifts – and the various solutions that these actors have found.
What does this mean for the future of multilateralism?
In the years ahead, updating the rules that seek to address the structurally disadvantaged position of developing, as opposed to developed, countries will remain a crucial task for states and international organisations alike. Differential treatment remains essential to ensuring the participation of disadvantaged states in the global order. However, as emerging powers grow in prominence, advanced industrialised countries like the US and EU members increasingly see these states as their competitors in global markets. As a result, they no longer want to give them preferential treatment. At the same time, there is little incentive for countries like Brazil, China, and India to give up the benefits that come with ‘special rights’ for developing countries.
Attempts at reform will only succeed if states find a convincing answer to how to deal with inequalities in a multipolar era.
Whether states manage to bridge their different positions on who counts as a 'developing' country – and thus entitled to special rights – is inextricably linked to the ongoing crisis of multilateralism. Attempts at reform within the UN and beyond will only succeed if states find a convincing answer to how to deal with inequalities in a multipolar era. Otherwise, conflicts over inequality will further exacerbate the deadlocks in many multilateral institutions. For instance, the WTO's inability to reform its special rights for developing country members has made it more difficult to reach new agreements.
On the flip side, the case of global health provides an example of how the way forward might look. Here, members do not grant special rights on a one-size-fits-all basis, but instead tailors them to the capacities of each member. This kind of flexible approach, based on a formula – and some economic indicators – is more likely to stand the test of time as global power continues to shift.
This contribution is based on the authors’ recent open-source publication on The Unmaking of Special Rights: Differential Treatment of Developing Countries in Times of Global Power Shifts. Clara Weinhardt is Deputy Project Coordinator for ENSURED and Assistant Professor in International Relations at Maastricht University. Klaus Dingwerth is Professor of Political Science at the University of St. Gallen. Julian Eckl is Post-doctoral Research Fellow at the University of St. Gallen.
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Photo: World Trade Organization / Flickr (CC BY-SA 2.0)
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