Aid for Trade is an important development initiative. It gives concrete expression to the objective of securing greater developing country participation in international trade, which is vital for promoting the global public good of a rules-based international trading system. Yet the complicated arrangements for the ‘governance’ and implementation of the Aid for Trade initiative make it challenging for developing countries to access the available resources. In its current form, Aid for Trade governance is at best ambivalent when it comes to the declared mission of supporting developing countries to build trade capacity, overcome supply side constraints and profit more fully from the international trading system. Moreover, there is a deficit in the institutional arrangements regarding access to and predictability of Aid for Trade resources. This is reflected in the skewed distribution of Aid for Trade across countries: in 2008, out of over a hundred eligible countries, the top twenty recipients captured 70 per cent of all Aid for Trade commitments (OECD 2010a).

The objectives of this chapter are twofold. First, it outlines the institutional arrangements for the governance and implementation of Aid for Trade. Second, it argues that as Aid for Trade has evolved, the key governance principle guiding implementation has become the mutual accountability of donors and beneficiaries, whereas equally important principles of access to and predictability of resources are much less prominent.