This chapter draws on Joseph Nye’s original definition of soft power as being the ability of a country or region to influence others by virtue simply of their wish to emulate them. As in the attractiveness of US culture during the cold war, and by the eagerness of post-communist Central and Eastern European countries to adopt the EU model as the basis of their economic and social reforms. The chapter notes however that while soft power is not a policy instrument as such, it can be linked to instruments such as aid or trade preferences to influence the behaviour of partners. The approach is therefore to look at the relationship between the values embodied in aid priorities of the EU institutions and the major donor states. Using a “Finger Kreinin Index” we find that the EU and its Member States are to some extent pulling in the same direction, but that the degree of coherence with the EU institutions varies across the key Member States. The tentative conclusion is that the EU and its Member States have been complementing rather than either replicating or contradicting each other’s actions.

A gender-responsive trade policy can lift obstacles faced by women in trade through, for instance, financial and non-financial incentives, or by providing access to trade-related infrastructure, especially in rural areas. Trade policies can create new opportunities for women entrepreneurs and female farmers, and for women to enter the workforce, in export sectors. In light of these opportunities, the chapter seeks to explore how capabilities for women can be expanded and enforced in global trade. Among other things, the research will delve into the ability of trade agreements to contribute to gender equality. Specifically, the chapter analyses these issues from the institutional aspect of the World Trade Organization (WTO) and its role in designing gender-inclusive trade policies and monitoring such policies through the Trade Policy Review Mechanism (TPRM).

This chapter describes why the World Trade Organization (WTO) has proven such a great challenge for the representation of women and women’s interests. Some progress has been made since the Aid-for-Trade programme, which cooperates with the WTO, incorporated gender mainstreaming in 2011. This includes the adoption of the 2017 Joint Declaration on Trade and Women’s Economic Empowerment and the inauguration of the WTO Gender Research Hub in 2021. Nevertheless, to date the WTO has lagged behind other international organizations, including organizations of global economic governance, in representing women and their interests. The chapter posits the following reasons in historical context: (i) Women did not ‘get in on the ground floor’ at the WTO; (ii) The locus of power at the WTO rests with the members (exemplified by the requirement for consensus and the ’single undertaking’, the importance of member proposals, and the institutional weakness of the Secretariat); (iii) The relative lateness and weakness of WTO involvement with civil society, compared to other institutions of global economic governance; (iv) The formative clashes during the 1980s and 1990s between gender and trade activism and trade liberalization; (v) The lex specialis nature of the WTO dispute settlement system; (vi) The WTO is primarily a ‘hard-law’ institution.

UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres in opening the United Nations General Assembly in September 2019 warned of great fractures, calling on the members to “reconnect with the Organization’s values, uphold human rights and restore trust.” Those words might equally have been applied to one of the historic fracture lines of the multilateral trading system. One of the most contentious topics within the system since its founding has been how best to include developing countries in its benefits and obligations. No solution has been found that has gained universal support.