Abstract
Reviewed by: Andrew F. Cooper (acooper@uwaterloo.ca ), Balsillie School of International Affairs and the Department of Political Science, University of Waterloo, Canada
Accountability for Effectiveness in Global Governance is the latest in a series of jointly edited books by John Kirton and Marina Larionova on global summitry. The collection is ambitious in scope as it deals with the three major summits—the G20, the G7/8, and the BRICS—and, although highly technical in some of the chapters, opens up some key issues in global governance that merit attention from a wider audience.
In terms of thematic structure, the opening chapters highlight the struggle of the G20 to tackle two different (and often contradictory) agendas. On the one hand, the chapter by Andrew Baker and Kateryna Dzhaha probes the difficulty of the G20 in tackling financial regulation as the memory of the 2008 crisis fades away. To their credit, Baker and Dzhaha want the G20 to step up in an even greater ambitious mode of operation to deal with what they term the paralysis of monetary policy (p.41). Unfortunately, however, the main vehicles they point to as the agents of this re-mobilization, the working groups so crucial to the initial success of the G20, have faded in significance. So, although in declaratory terms Baker and Dzhaha make a compelling argument for the convening of a specialist working group on monetary policy, the likelihood of action along these lines is minimal, at least until some future financial crisis of serious magnitude. Indeed, the choice of the word stasis is not only relevant in the context of monetary policy, but to the role of the G20 more widely as a crisis committee.
The chapter by Vladimir Zuev and Anastasia Nevskaya reinforces the image of obstacles in front of the G20 and related bodies in the global financial architecture. Although one of the most significant components of the informal turn in global governance has been the revamping of the Financial Stability Board, this body has faced frustrations as the editors note (p.14) in terms of the slow pace of implementation. At a time where explicit forms of protection have increased, any expectation about the ability of even a reformed World Trade Organization to stretch its regulatory function on regulatory services (p.45) has to be tempered as well.
On the other hand, an array of chapters point not only to the possibility but also the obstacles in the way of the G20 moving forward as a steering committee with an ambit far broader than originally conceived in 2008. In this category of chapters falls Victoria Panova’s contribution on global energy; the contribution by John Kirton, Ella Kokotsis, and Aurora Hudson on climate change; and the chapter by Julia Kulik on gender equality. In each of these chapters, the hope is that the G20 can move into areas poorly covered in terms of global governance. And in each, the G20 can be judged as coming up short of these expectations. Panova’s conclusion that the G20 might find consensus in energy has conceptual attraction (p.80). However, the trend appears to be towards ad hoc deals between individual countries (including Russia and Saudi Arabia), not a more comprehensive form of collective global energy governance. Kirton and his collaborators point to the trend in G20 summitry that is towards fewer, rather than more, commitments in climate change (p.97). And Kulik argues that the G20 performance—no less than the G7/8’s—has been slow notwithstanding some renewed progress (p.120).
The great strength of the collection, as in past works, is the combination of detailed analysis (including an extensive discussion of compliance measures) with an appreciation of both the competition and connections between the G20, the G7/8, and the BRICS. Of these forums, nevertheless, the G20 and the G7/8 receive the bulk of the scrutiny. Apart from two valuable chapters by Caroline Bracht and Hanh Nguyen and Marina Larionova and a cluster of co-authors, the BRICS receive short shrift. This relative neglect is surprising, given the expertise available to the co-editors.
Still, the biggest gap is the lack of analysis of the geopolitical implications around the constellation of summit processes apparent even in 2015 when the bulk of the chapters were first produced for a conference in Moscow. A contribution by Heidi Hardt and Brent Sasely touches on the issue of membership suspensions, generally, in international organizations. If valuable as a survey piece, though, an article about Russia’s relationship to the G7/8 would have been far more valuable. This gap is reinforced, furthermore, by an inability to separate the G7 from the G7/8 in terms of compliance. Given the trajectory of Russian relations with the G7, some speculation at least about the implications of this trend with respect to like-mindedness would have been useful as well. The implications of Ben Cormier’s chapter on G8 compliance reinforces this line of inquiry. If, as Cormier suggests with good reason, compliance increases with more ministerial meetings, and more specific policy coverage (p.193), what does this mean for the future not only of the G7 but also for the BRICS?
Despite this critique, the Kirton and Larionova collection showcases the certainty that informal summit processes continue to be at the centre of debate in international relations, and that these processes deserve nuanced treatment. At the same time, in a very different environment in 2018, as in either 2008 or 2015, little disagreement can be made about the co-editors’ final suggestion for future research. For all the deserved focus on the summit processes from an international perspective, specific countries stand out in terms of their critical importance: above all, China and the United States (p.275).