ASIA OVER LUNCH LECTURE – Noon in 4130 Posvar. Please feel free to join us for this lecture – all are welcome to bring their lunch or a snack along if you wish and enjoy!

This lecture will explore the emergence and development of the Philippines’s coalition-building strategy in the World Trade Organization (WTO) from the Uruguay Round to the Doha Development Agenda. Drawing on social constructivism, Quinsaat argues that coalition building is an outcome of social learning and adaptation of trade negotiators based on years of working within the norms of the WTO and of employing bounded rationality or subjective judgments about uncertainties. Coalition building is a sub-optimal product of power politics in the WTO and of bureaucratic politics at the capital, rather than a result of a policy formulation process based on objective areas of economic strength and comparative advantage. The Philippines maintains an instrumental view of coalitions in its pursuit of national interest. However, this notion of “national interest” did not exist a priori; trade negotiators recognized this in the process of negotiation. The Philippines has consistently allied itself with Brazil, China, and India to increase its bargaining power—to provide political backing for its proposals and to bolster its capacity to block the outcome of negotiations.