Multilateral negotiations on worldwide challenges have grown in importance with rising global interdependence. Yet, they have recently proven slow to address these challenges successfully. This book discusses the questions which have arisen from the highly varying results of recent multilateral attempts to reach cooperation on some of the critical global challenges of our times. These include the long-awaited UN climate change summit in Copenhagen, which ended without official agreement in 2009; Cancun one year later, attaining at least moderate tangible results; the first salient trade negotiations after the creation of the WTO, which broke down in Seattle in 1999 and were only successfully launched in 2001 in Qatar as the Doha Development Agenda; and the biosafety negotiations to address the international handling of Living Modified Organisms, which first collapsed in 1999, before they reached the Cartagena Protocol in 2000. Using in-depth empirical analysis, the book examines the determinants of success or failure in efforts to form regimes and manage the process of multilateral negotiations.