Reforming and Transforming: Change Initiatives for the WTO and its Secretariat (invitation only)

We are getting ready for yet another Global Economic Governance seminar lecture.

This time we will welcome a key person in the process of reform of the World Trade Organisation. Ms Victoria Donaldson is Transformation Office Manager at the WTO Secretariat. 

IMPORTANT NOTE: this event is on invitation only and closed to the public

Abstract

The WTO and its Secretariat were established in 1995. Much has changed in the nearly 28 years since then – ways of working, the ways Members trade, and the global geopolitical and economic landscape. In recent years Members have increasingly called for reform of the WTO as an organisation, and at the conclusion of the 12th Ministerial Conference in June of this year, they committed "to work towards necessary reform of the WTO".

In February of this year WTO Director-General Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala launched a transformation programmed within the Secretariat. What do Members and the Secretariat want to change, what should they want to change, and what are the obstacles to change?

Victoria Donaldson, the WTO Secretariat's Transformation Office Manager, will lead a discussion on what is happening internally in the WTO Secretariat's transformation programme, what WTO Members want or should want to reform in the Organization itself, and where these initiatives may intersect.

Full biography of the speaker

In February 2022 Victoria Donaldson was appointed Transformation Office Manager in the WTO Secretariat. She had returned to the WTO in 2021, joining the Delivery Unit that was working to support preparations for the 12th Ministerial Conference. From 2018-2021 she was Deputy Director in the UK Government Legal Department, where she led the Free Trade Agreements, Services, Investment & Digital Trade team within the Department for International Trade Legal Advisers. Until 2017, she was Chief Legal Officer at the WTO Appellate Body Secretariat. Before joining the WTO in 1999, she practised trade and competition law in Brussels and served as a law clerk at the Supreme Court of Canada.

Ms Donaldson has taught subsidies and dispute settlement courses in previous MILE cycles. She has also been a Visiting WTO Fellow at the University of Adelaide, and has lectured at the Uni­versity of Melbourne Law School, the National Law University in Jodhpur, and the Uni­versidad Externado in Bogotá, and served as a judge for university moot court competitions relating to international trade law. Ms Donaldson holds an LL.M. degree from Harvard University, an LL.B. degree from the University of British Columbia, B.A. and M.A. degrees in law from the University of Oxford and an A.B. in International Relations from Stanford University. Ms Donaldson is a Solicitor of the Law Society of England & Wales and a Member of the New York Bar.