This week sees the start and finish of the 16th UNCTAD in Geneva. It will go largely unnoticed by governments, including in the South, most of whom will not even deem it fit for ministerial representation, as well as by the world’s media who, to the extent they show any interest, are asking whether it has changed its acronym to UNTAD. It remains the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD), though whether this three-day event merits the designation “conference” seems debatable.It is an emaciated version of past conferences which, beginning with the first lasting from March to June in 1964, were at the centre of efforts by developing countries to reshape the rules and practices of the post-war liberal order. Their goal was to complement and reinforce their hard-fought political independence with real economic independence.The combination of political solidarity among Southern countries and a powerful analytical framework, provided by the Argentinian economist Raul Prebisch, which mapped out the constraints holding back development prospects and offered a way forward, attracted world leaders, from Che Guevara to the Pope and Valéry Giscard d’Estaing, to the deliberations in 1964.Thanks to the newly found solidarity of developing countries, what had been envisaged as a one-off event by advanced countries became a permanent quadrennial gathering with its own mandate, secretariat, negotiating structures, and administrative practices. As such, its unique combination of universal membership and clear developmental orientation gave it a unique presence in the post-war multilateral landscape.Armed with a mandate to tackle a broad array of development policy challenges and a negotiating framework that could seek a consensus for change, it contested the vision for global governance advanced by the GATT in Geneva and the multilateral financial institutions in Washington, whose operations were (and remain) dominated by developed countries.With the support of the G77, the grouping of developing countries created at the end of the first UNCTAD conference to advance (and in important respects protect) the work of the organisation, UNCTAD was, in its first decade, able to make a series of (small but meaningful) changes to the rules and practices governing international trade and finance.But with the economic and geo-political turbulence of the 1970s, following Nixon’s upending of Bretton Woods, the ongoing war in Viet Nam, and the oil price shock, developing countries pushed for a bolder agenda at the UN in 1974, with UNCTAD the de facto secretariat of efforts to establish a New International Economic Order (NIEO).Those efforts dominated multilateral discussions for the remainder of the decade but were eventually halted and then derailed by the US through a series of unilateral policy moves that triggered a recession at home and abroad and a deep-seated debt crisis in many developing countries. While UNCTAD continued to advance a progressive agenda for the remainder of the decade, particularly around resolving the ongoing debt crisis, solidarity among developing countries was visibly weakened and conferences became more fractured and less productive affairs.By the early 1990s, many developing countries, particularly in Latin America, had embraced the neo-liberal agenda pushed by the Washington institutions, while the Uruguay Round of trade negotiations were occupying (and exhausting) diplomats in Geneva. At the 8th conference in Cartagena, many of these countries joined the advanced countries in calling for the closure of the institution. Asian and African countries in the G77 prevented that from happening, but at the cost of a reduction in resources, the removal of negotiating capacities, and a weaker mandate, all agreed to at its 9th conference in, of all places, post-apartheid South Africa.Still, its willingness to push back against neo-liberal wisdom was apparent at its 10th conference in Bangkok in 2000. This followed the Asian financial crisis, a product of excessive liberalisation and unruly private capital flows. UNCTAD had warned, in some of its earlier reports, of such a possibility, along with a more general critique of the threats and inequities posed by hyperglobalisation. And at its 11th Conference in São Paulo, and to the annoyance of developed countries, the concern that developing countries were suffering an undue diminution of their policy space was the dominant theme.The global financial crisis, the culmination of the failed neo-liberal project, seemed to offer UNCTAD a new opening, with many more figures calling for a rethink of the rules and practices of the hyperglobalised world economy. Instead, advanced countries, having adopted a slew of interventionist measures to save their banking systems and boost their economies, doubled down on the “business as usual” agenda. Predictably, they resisted efforts to strengthen UNCTAD at the 13th conference in Doha.Since then, UNCTAD has been plagued by a combination of belligerence from advanced countries, determined to silence its developmental voice and turn it into an unthreatening technical assistance body, and by failed leadership – first by a former Kenyan trade minister (who used the institution as a travel agency for his golfing passion) and currently by a former vice president of Costa Rica (who has used it to position herself for a bid for the top job in New York), all too willing to go along with the hollowing-out of the institution. More disturbingly, the G77, through a combination of neglect and fragmentation, has accepted this drift.With multilateralism facing its biggest crisis in 80 years and development prospects under threat from a variety of sources, the South has begun to show signs of vigour, from new regional trade arrangements to alternative financial financing mechanisms and an expanded BRICS. But reading through the outcome document for the conference, there seems little appreciation of the urgent need for systemic change nor a willingness to see UNCTAD assume a role that could help channel those efforts into lasting change at the multilateral level.