Singapore’s Trade Agreements Show How Small States Shape Global Legal Norms

As the fallout from the Iran war has renewed attention to the fragility of global supply chains, Singapore is emerging as a leading architect of new agreements and partnerships to maintain the flow of essential goods. In early April, Australia and Singapore announced they had substantially concluded negotiations on a legally binding protocol covering economic resilience and essential supplies, including petroleum and Liquefied Natural Gas (LNG). Weeks later, New Zealand Prime Minister Christopher Luxon travelled to Singapore to sign the Agreement on Trade in Essential Supplies (AOTES), committing both countries to maintain the flow of essential goods during supply-chain disruptions.

Looking at the legal text of AOTES, this is not merely another energy supply or free trade agreement. The binding instrument is the first-of-its-kind, requiring both countries, where practicable, to keep ports and air terminals open, identify alternative routes and fulfil other obligations aimed at keeping essential goods moving. AOTES, therefore, inaugurates a new kind of trade agreement directed specifically at supply-chain resilience.

Singapore’s diplomatic language makes it clear that these agreements are just as much about creating a model for supply-chain cooperation to ensure “global energy supply chains are kept open” as they are about creating bilateral assurances.

Singapore’s role in developing and promoting supply-chain resilience agreements illustrates how it exercises “norm entrepreneurship” in practice. Much has been written about how large countries shape global norms by leveraging market power or through coercion, from the “Brussels Effect” to American and Chinese strategic dominance. In contrast, Singapore positions itself as a “neutral facilitator”, pioneering agreements that are flexible enough to accommodate countries with different strategic interests, but concrete enough for legal norms to crystallise and proliferate.

A notable example of Singapore’s norm entrepreneurship in international trade law is the substance and structure of its digital economy agreements (DEAs). Early DEAs include the Digital Economy Partnership Agreement (DEPA) with New Zealand and Chile in 2020, followed by the Australia–Singapore DEA the same year. Unlike traditional e-commerce clauses in older trade agreements, which were mainly concerned with the online trade of goods and services, Singapore’s DEAs prioritise implementing rules to regulate the data-driven economy itself, including regulations on digital identity, e-payments, Artificial Intelligence (AI) governance and digital competition.

… Singapore positions itself as a “neutral facilitator”, pioneering agreements that are flexible enough to accommodate countries with different strategic interests, but concrete enough for legal norms to crystallise and proliferate.

Some scholars have noted that these provisions tend to take the form of ‘soft law’ commitments, such as endeavour clauses or broad statements of intent, rather than more specific or binding commitments. However, this does not diminish their legal or political significance, nor are all such provisions equally soft. This is evident, for example, in the contrast between DEPA’s provision on digital identity, which states that parties shall “endeavour” to cooperate, and the stronger Australia–Singapore DEA commitment, which requires that parties “shall pursue the development of mechanisms to promote compatibility between their respective digital identity regimes”. The significance of these provisions lies not only in what they do bilaterally, but in how they socialise emerging expectations about digital trade governance, laying the groundwork for harder law commitments.

Elements from Singapore’s DEAs have already influenced other digital agreements. The recent Joint Statement Initiative (JSI) at the World Trade Organization (WTO) in March 2026, co-led by Singapore, Australia and Japan, incorporates similar language and topics from previous DEAs. The JSI established interim commitments adopted by 66 WTO members as a pathway to bring the WTO Agreement on Electronic Commerce into force, which would create the world’s first baseline set of global digital trade rules, including binding commitments on electronic signatures, electronic contracts and e-invoices, among other areas.

Singapore-led DEAs have also supplied the building blocks for the ASEAN Digital Economy Framework Agreement, which includes binding rules covering many of the same policy areas in Singapore DEAs, such as digital trade, cross-border e-commerce and AI.

Singapore’s approach to essential supply chains follows a similar logic to its digital trade approach: using softer arrangements to test and socialise norms before pursuing harder commitments with other partners. Softer law antecedents to AOTES can be seen, for instance, in Singapore’s memorandum of understanding (MoU) with South Korea, which requires both countries to convene an emergency meeting in the event of supply-chain disruptions.

Like DEPA, AOTES is also meant to be a template others can copy or join. However, the diffusion of norms under AOTES will be harder than in digital trade agreements because essential supplies touch on the more politically sensitive issue of resource scarcity in times of crisis. Were bigger states to join such an arrangement, it is unclear how their larger essential supply demands would be accommodated.

Nonetheless, the model set by AOTES could adopt the modular structure of DEPA, allowing new partners to join selected areas of cooperation rather than accept an all-or-nothing bargain. This would make it easier to accommodate different national vulnerabilities, whether in fuel, food, medical supplies or logistics, while preserving the broader norm that trusted partners should keep essential goods moving, even during crises.

This pragmatic and incrementalist approach is not new for Singapore; it has been carried over from traditional trade agreements to forge partnerships in novel policy domains. Other than AOTES, Singapore is also adopting this trade agreement model to address emerging challenges such as decarbonisation and sustainable finance, as seen in the launch of the Green Economy Partnership Agreement with DEPA partners New Zealand and Chile.

Singapore’s approach should not be thought of as a turn away from multilateralism, but rather as a pragmatic response to the limits of the WTO system. Countries cannot wait for a consensus to address pressing issues that old trade rules do not adequately cover. The question is not whether plurilateral agreements will be entered into, but what kind. Indeed, the devil is in the details, and not all bilateral or plurilateral agreements will reinforce the liberal international vision of world trade.

Singapore’s plurilateral agreements, however, do not represent an abandonment of the system, but rather, an attempt to strengthen it. As Singapore’s first foreign minister, S. Rajaratnam described in Singapore’s accession speech to the United Nations that Singapore’s commitment to the international law system is out of “practical self-interest and not vague idealism”. In international trade law, it is this self-interest as a major beneficiary of the rules-based order that pushes Singapore to innovate within, rather than undermine, the system.

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