The Strict Distributive Strategy for a Bargaining Coalition : The Like Minded Group in the World Trade Organization, 1998-2001

Developing country delegates in multilateral trade negotiations have become quite active in forming bargaining coalitions. But there has been little research concerning how this has been done, what the results have been, or what influences these results.1 In tackling these questions, this paper identifies strategy choices made by weak-state coalitions as possible influences on their outcomes, the outcome being the primary dependent variable. Our method is to investigate a single case and attempt to generate a potential generalization for further investigation in other cases. From 1998 through the Doha ministerial conference of November 2001, the Like Minded Group of countries (LMG) illustrated what we call the strict distributive strategy in negotiations in the World Trade Organization. This coalition put forward a number of detailed proposals that would have shifted value from North to South and denied any negotiating gain to the North until the North had first granted the group’s demands. Despite a great deal of organized professional effort in Geneva, however, the group sustained a major loss and collected relatively small gains especially on their leading issue compared with the status quo, by the time of the Doha conference as we read the record. The LMG did play a leading role in delaying what they regarded as another serious loss. But this coalition gained less at Doha than others such as the coalition concerned with TRIPS and public health, which used the mixed-distributive strategy, as shown in a companion paper