On December 1, 2009, I presented a proposal for a WTO agreement on the supply of global public goods, at a joint KEI/IQSensato side event at the Geneva WTO ministerial meeting.

The text of the proposal is available here. The slides are available in PDF format.

This proposal was presented earlier by Manon Ress in 2008 at a Columbia University workshop on public goods, by Thiru Balasubramaniam at the Yale A2K3 workshop, and by me at several meetings, including at the World Forum on Science and Democracy, held in Belém, Brasil in January 2009. (See the text of the Belém remarks here, and a comment by David Bollier here. This was the first time the proposal was presented at the WTO.

At this point, it seems realistic that a proposal to discuss a possible schedule for commitments in the areas of public goods and technology transfer will be made within the WTO, in the not too distant future.