Review of International Organizations
Aid for reconfiguration: How the EU won multilateral protection of geographical indications
2026-06-11
This article leverages data on the regional allocation of development aid to test a novel theory: the European Union and several of its member states strategically use and orchestrate aid to support the establishment of Geographical Indications (GIs), such as Kampot pepper in Cambodia. As a result, the recipient countries’ material interests change and they become more supportive of GI protection in the global trade regime. In 2020, this resulted in a multilateral GI register under the Geneva Act, in spite of US opposition. I label this mechanism “aid for reconfiguration”, and argue it is not reducible to aid for policy or aid for trade. Regressions of Geneva Act accessions on GI aid corroborate the hypothesized mechanism. The article complements the GODAD geo-coded aid data by coding the location of aid-sponsored GIs, which are found to be more likely to be located in country leaders’ birth regions, and to lead to pro-GI multilateral policy changes. The findings suggest that sector-relevant aid to leaders’ birth regions is more effective at generating multilateral policies favored by the donors.