Eight years after coming into force, the 12 member governments of the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership (CPTPP) are busy refreshing the deal.¹ Ministers and senior officials from Australia, Brunei, Canada, Chile, Japan, Malaysia, Mexico, New Zealand, Peru, Singapore, the United Kingdom, and Vietnam are gathering in London on 13 May to discuss future plans.

The agenda is crowded. In addition to starting negotiations on upgrades and additions to the existing legal texts, members are grappling with the expansion of membership. Costa Rica reached “substantial conclusion” on its accession and will soon become the 13th member.² Additional applications have been received from Uruguay, the United Arab Emirates, Indonesia, the Philippines, China, and Taiwan.³

Members are also actively working with other trade blocs to create greater alignment on specific issues at a time of increasing global economic turbulence. This includes discussions with the European Union (EU) and the 11 members of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN). On the same day that CPTPP economic leaders are gathering in London, a group of trade experts from the EU and CPTPP will be meeting in Tokyo to consider how to cooperate on topics like digital trade or craft improved customs and regulatory alignment.⁴

Much of the time at the London officials meeting will be taken up with internal discussions of the existing CPTPP arrangements. Members spent three years conducting a general review (which was originally mandated for year “3” of the agreement). That comprehensive look at the texts identified areas for improvement and further negotiations in electronic commerce, trade in services, customs administration and trade facilitation, competitiveness and business facilitation, and trade and women's economic empowerment.⁵

In the years since the original agreement was negotiated, members have made a handful of changes, mostly to provide additional language around accessions.⁶ But the substance of the CPTPP agreement has not changed.⁷ The start of talks to craft new rules and commitments in the five areas outlined above will be the first time members have agreed to revise the legal texts. The process for working through these talks has not yet been established, and the potential timelines for conclusion are unknown.

The 2026 Chair, Vietnam, was also tasked with addressing other topics like investment, state-owned enterprises, innovation, gender mainstreaming, economic coercion, and market-distorting practices. The current CPTPP document does include commitments for investment, state-owned enterprises, and a little bit on gender as part of the chapter on development.⁸ Additional negotiations will be necessary to adjust these rules, if members opt to do so, or to add new topics or chapters for the future.

One important early promise of members was to create a trade agreement that would be a “living” document — easily adjusted as conditions and membership needs changed. In practice, this has proven harder to do than it sounds. Even simple tweaks to better align existing text with subsequent practices could trigger a full-blown review and approval process in some member governments.

However, adjustments to other existing agreements have been a standard practice for many CPTPP members, including those in Asia. ASEAN, for example, regularly upgrades its own free trade agreement commitments with Dialogue Partners like Australia and New Zealand.⁹

Many CPTPP members have been busy working on a range of pledges in the covered areas like electronic commerce since 2018. Moving some of these commitments into the CPTPP, such as those in the World Trade Organization’s Joint Statement Initiative on E-commerce pushed by CPTPP members Australia, Japan, and Singapore, should be relatively straightforward.¹⁰ CPTPP members, like Singapore, have also been active in crafting digital economy agreements with partners like Australia and the UK, which might also have provisions that could be slotted into the CPTPP texts.¹¹

Some of the newer areas, like economic coercion or innovation, may take longer to negotiate. Any final commitments could be closer to soft law than hard, legally-binding rules. Given the high levels of economic disruption that members have faced since the original launch of talks in 2010, using the CPTPP as a platform for discussions, transparency, and cooperation should be encouraged.

Members should also consider adding a chapter to the CPTPP on trade in times of crisis. The key objective would be to clarify the processes and procedures for managing crisis events in advance. Just agreeing on focal points for information sharing across members would be an advantage to governments grappling with a range of disruptions to trade in the future. Of course, the chapter could do much more, but the general point would be to enhance transparency and cooperation ahead of a challenge. Much of the work that could guide such negotiations has already been done by the United Nations Economic and Social Commission for Asia and the Pacific (UNESCAP).¹²

One critically important upgrade remains the determination of a CPTPP Secretariat.¹³ Coordinating a complex agreement, conducting upgrade negotiations, managing challenging accession members and processes, as well as creating alignment with other regional trade blocs are increasingly impossible to manage through annual rotating chairs. The current institutional structure includes ad hoc interim meetings as well as one Commission meeting per year.

The reasons given by members for not having a Secretariat range from practical issues, such as difficulties in deciding where it should be located, who will pay, how much funding will be provided by each member, and who will serve as staff, to larger worries like the potential for a powerful Secretariat in the future that could undermine the specific wishes of individual members.

As an interim measure, at the 9th Commission meeting, members agreed to create a “Unit.” The final statement says, “We commit to establish a Unit that will provide administrative support in the stewardship of the Agreement's implementation and operation. In this regard, we task officials to commence discussion on the development of its functions, structure, and workplan, and report the outcomes to the Commission in 2026.”¹⁴

The Unit could start, as an example, by putting out a clear set of information on the CPTPP, including the legal texts, inclusion of all adjustments to the text (such as the changes to accession processes agreed by Commission decisions), and member schedules and commitments. The schedules for the most recently acceded member, the United Kingdom, are not currently listed on most CPTPP member websites, including that of New Zealand, which serves as the Depository country for the agreement. There has never been a comprehensive list of side letters. Details on potential applicants, including a basic list of interested parties, have never been available.

Information about decisions made during Commission meetings, any ad hoc sessions, or indeed, even a list of future Commission Chairs, is non-existent or difficult to find. If the CPTPP is to be a valuable trade platform for the future, these basic information gaps need to be addressed.

But the start of negotiations on important topics like digital trade, economic coercion, and investment changes requires CPTPP members to go far beyond just providing basic information. One of the best elements of the original TPP negotiations was the inclusion of formal processes for input from stakeholders and the ongoing engagement of officials with stakeholders and members of the media.

Talks cannot and should not take place entirely behind closed doors, in a vacuum with limited outside input. Citizens around the world have become much more familiar with the ways in which trade policy can affect their daily lives. The CPTPP texts repeatedly emphasize the importance of transparency. It is long past time for members to move past “talking the talk.” It is time to “walk the walk.” This refresh provides an important opportunity for the growing group of members to take the agreement and commitments seriously.