CITD is partnering with the Remaking Trade for a Sustainable Future project and the World Bank, the Inter-American Development Bank, the Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean, Resources for the Future, the Council on Foreign Relations, the American Society of International Law, and Silverado Accelerator to bring a fresh set of ideas and proposals for such trading system reforms to the Washington trade policy community at a major conference to be held at the Georgetown University Law Center on Thursday, February 8, 2024. This event will bring together a wide array of government officials, members of Congress and their staff, representatives from international organizations, embassy officials, think tanks, and representatives of industry, labor, and environmental groups.

The conference will be organized around the ideas and themes of a recently released report, The Villars Framework for a Sustainable Global Trade System. The Framework is itself the culmination of more than two years of work to rethink the foundations for international trade and develop a reform agenda for the World Trade Organization (WTO) to better position the multilateral trading system to meet the needs of the current moment. The Remaking Trade for a Sustainable Future project has been led by Dan Esty from Yale, Jan Yves Remy from the University of the West Indies, and Joel Trachtman from Tufts. It brought together thinking from 10 workshops held around the world and a culminating conference in Villars, Switzerland to map the challenges confronting the WTO, diagnose the reasons that the trading system is facing challenges, and put together a blueprint of where the world needs to go over the next decade to address them. Among these challenges are climate change, standards, subsidies, economic development, circular trade, resilient value chains, sustainable development, and social issues.