Developing State Coalition-Building: A Focused Comparison

This article pits two diplomatic strategies in competition for policy officials’ support. Distributive strategies promote one party’s goals at the expense of another. Integrative strategies promote goals that are in conflict with those of another state. The focus is strategy choice and strategy’s bargaining potential of less developed countries (LDC) coalitions in the GATT/WTO regime. Amrita Narlikar, whose study of LDC coalitions is relied upon here, finds that many LDC states employ distributive strategy because of asymmetric structure, which emphasizes the gap between LDC and developed state capabilities, yet she critiques that strategy as ineffective in supporting LDC objectives. This disconnect is probed in this article, which concludes that LDC distributive strategy must be improved and that the integrative strategy’s success in attaining LDC objectives can be important enough to override the structural argument for distributive strategy.