The Power of the G20

The Politics of Legitimacy in Global Governance

Steven Slaughter

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9780429619304
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Can the power of the G20 be legitimate? This book examines the politics surrounding the G20's efforts to act effectively and legitimately and the problems and challenges involved in this activity.

Developing a critical constructivist conceptualisation of the G20, the book considers holistically and practically the ways that the G20 develops various forms of power and influence and acts as an apex form of global governance that seeks to be an overall coordinating forum to address global problems. Assessing how debates about the legitimacy of the G20 shaped its operation, Slaughter argues that the G20's power can be legitimate despite a range of considerable challenges and limits. The book also explores what measures the G20 could take to be more legitimate in the future.

Offering a direct and accessible consideration of the politics of legitimacy with respect to the G20, this book will be of interest to those attempting to understand and analyse the G20 as well as to scholars of IR theory, global political economy, global policy, diplomacy and globalisation.

1
The purpose and power of the G20

The G20 has become a prominent element of global governance. However, the influence and power of the G20 is often either assumed or dismissed. This chapter contends that the power of the G20 resides in its informal capacity to develop new institutions and networks, coordinate other forms of global governance, develop policy discourses and set policy agendas. This power can be understood by situating the G20 in a broader context of global governance and the history of summitry with regards to the preceding iterations of the G system – the G6/7/8, the G20 finance ministers and central bank governors’ meetings (G20 FM/CBG), and the formation and elaboration of the G20 leaders’ meeting in 2008. This chapter demonstrates that while some states wish to ensure that the G20 remains primarily an informal meeting of leaders, it is developing to be a global summitry complex where more institutionalised forms of activity are evident in the intensification and elaboration of transnational networks of policy-makers. These networks are especially evident in the form of G20 working groups, comprising transgovernmental groups of government officials, and the public G20 outreach processes via the development of the Think 20, Labour 20, Business 20, Civil 20, Youth 20, Women 20 and Science 20 groups – which include representatives from the relevant sectors.

This chapter articulates the ways that the purpose and power of the G20 has developed. In so doing, it outlines the way that the G20 is a form of discursive global governance whereby the collective intention is to develop policy discourses that address global problems and disseminate these political ideas and priorities through the activity of international organisations (IOs) and member states. The transgovernmental and transnational policy networks have a crucial role in channelling the communication of these policy discourses. Networks associated with G20 working groups and outreach groups demonstrate the discursive nature of the G20 because the G20 is fundamentally an informal forum for policy ideas rather than a negotiating forum of binding regulations. Consequently, it is important to consider how the development of transnational policy networks in the form of G20 outreach processes are able to sustain the power, effectiveness and legitimacy of the G20. While there is no doubt that outreach processes are “ad hoc responses to the widespread charge that the G20 reproduces the politics of exclusion in global governance” (Cooper and Pouliot 2015: 14), they have the potential to improve both the effectiveness and the legitimacy of G20 summits. The G20 possesses uncertain legitimacy and members are aware of this and have a corresponding willingness to actively develop political practices, such as outreach processes, to support the capacity and legitimacy of the G20. This chapter first outlines the evolution of the configuration and purpose of the G20; it then analyses the forms of power and influence of the G20. Next, it considers the ways this discursive influence operates with respect to the G20 summitry processes, and, lastly, it outlines how these processes operate to enhance the legitimacy and effectiveness of the G20.

The evolution of the G20

In order to explain the contemporary purpose and operation of the G20 it is important to locate the G20 in the broader history of the G system. There are four important aspects of the evolving operation of G system which shape the G20 as a global summitry complex that incorporates meetings of leaders and a hub of policy networks. The first aspect of the evolution of the G system is its growing membership. The G20 has its origins in the informal meetings of the finance ministers of the USA, UK, France and West Germany held in 1973. This grouping was also known as the Library Group due to these informal discussions being held in the White House library. This group was enlarged in 1974, with the addition of finance ministers from Japan and Italy, to focus on the economic consequences of oil crises and economic stagnation of the early 1970s (Kharas and Lombardi 2012: 2). In 1975, the collective decision was made for leaders of the member states to attend the first G6 (Group of Six) meeting hosted by France in Rambouillet. Canada joined in 1976, creating the G7, and the president of the European Commission (EC) was invited to attend the annual summits from 1977 onwards. The membership of the G7 was stable until Russia was invited to participate in 1997 thereby creating the G8 (Kharas and Lombardi 2012: 2), though some meetings were restricted to the G7 creating the designation G7/8.

Membership of the G20 was determined by a meeting of G7 finance ministers, with the new grouping originally being designated as the G20 FM/CBG in response to the Asian financial crisis in 1999. While a G22 and G33 were also developed, these were found to be too unwieldy (Kharas and Lombardi 2012: 4). The G20 FM/CBG held its first summit in Berlin and was created as a new informal process to engage with the Bretton Woods institutions to “broaden the dialogue on key economic and financial policy issues among systemically significant economies” (G7 1999, para 19). The G7/8 and G20 FM/CBG coexisted as discrete diplomatic processes, with the G8 occasionally including other states as visitors to its meetings. This included the G8 + 5 process, when China, India, Brazil, Mexico and South Africa were invited to the G8 for the first time in 2005, and more substantively in 2007, when German chancellor Angela Merkel announced the establishment of the Heiligendamm Process, which formalised the G8 + 5 (Cooper and Pouliot 2015: 339). This movement towards including significant emerging market states was accelerated by the 2008 global financial crisis, which prompted the G7 to create the G20 as a leader’s forum to fully include these economically significant states. As such, the G20 stands at the intersection of the continued influence of the G7 members alongside the emerging economies of Brazil, Russia, India and China (BRICs) and the activity of middle power states, such as Australia, Mexico and South Korea (Downie 2017). The formation of the G20 leaders’ forum in 2008 stemmed from the belief of G7 policy-makers that effective and swift international coordination required an informal body of leaders with a broader membership than the G7/8 operating outside of the existing multilateral IOs. The membership of the G20 was already in place in the form of the G20 FM/CBG’s membership (Kharas and Lombardi 2012: 6; Pisani-Ferry 2018). Despite this desire for swift action, the formation of the G20 provoked various initial concerns about the legitimacy of this process, which will be explored further in Chapter 2.

The second aspect of the G system’s evolution is the way this form of global summitry has balanced the importance of informal discussions of leaders with other more prescribed processes of political interaction between member states. The informality of the G system is emphasised by the ways the G20 and its precursors were established and operate outside the formal protocols of international law and the multilateral UN system. As such, the G20 involves executive leaders of member states at the annual summits engaging in relaxed and wide-ranging discussions where there is no intention of creating a new treaty or negotiating a formal agreement. However, this informality intersects with long-standing forms of political activity that attempt to support the deliberations of the leaders. After all, while G7/8 and G20 meetings have been lauded for the flexible and informal manner in which leaders can meet, they have also involved the work of Sherpas, who meet before the summit of world leaders to prepare the agenda. It is also important to emphasise that the G20 FM/CBG still meets, and there are meetings of other government departments, such as trade, agriculture and energy, in what are referred to as ministerial meetings. Most G20 summits have been arranged around two “tracks” of activity. While there is cross pollination of issues across these tracks, state leaders tend to operate within the political focus of the “Sherpa track”, which addresses various policy bottlenecks and tensions, and economic policy-makers and the G20 FM/CBG focus upon the more technical “finance track” (Bery 2018: 7).

Furthermore, from the first G6 at Rambouillet onwards the summits have produced official declarations or communiqués as the primary outputs of the summit’s determinations. These summits enable dialogue between world leaders to produce mutually agreed policy priorities, which are expressed in a communiqué and are subsequently meant to be enacted by member governments. The political institutionalisation behind the scenes has continued to develop through more systematic forms of policy-making activity to support the discussions of the leaders. While there have been ongoing discussions about whether the G20 needs a permanent secretariat to systematically process the information relevant to the issues it confronts (Cooper 2012: 17), these discussions have not been widely supported. However, since 2002 there has been an agreement to create a “Troika” of the host country plus the previous host and forthcoming host to enable some consistency of the policy agenda across different hosts (Kharas and Lombardi 2012: 5; Downie and Crump 2017: 683). The host country, in conjunction with the rest of the Troika, plays an important function in setting the agenda and process of the G20 summit and thereby establishes the policy issues to be discussed and prioritised.

The third aspect of the G system’s evolution follows from the previous point in the sense that the development of more prescribed processes has led to the inclusion of various officials and experts into the summit process. Since the 1996 G7 summit, leaders from IOs and regional organisations have been periodically invited. The G20 has been more systematic in its engagement with other IOs, inviting leaders from the UN, the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the International Labour Organization (ILO), the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), the World Bank Group and the World Trade Organization (WTO) and the Financial Stability Board (FSB), to plan and attend the summit. Indeed, the G20 has also been the location for creating other forms of global governance, including the FSB and its precursor, the Financial Stability Forum (FSF) at the G20 FM/CBG in 1999 (Cooper and Pouliot 2015: 339). Since the formation of the G20 FM/CBG forum there has been a greater array of officials and experts involved in preparations for the meetings of finance ministers to address complicated issues of global financial governance (Baker 2009: 203). This has required detailed policy prescriptions from existing IOs and forms of global governance, which “necessarily entailed an intensification of the network relationships that already existed between the G20 and a broad array of IOs, technical agencies and networks” (Eccleston et al. 2015: 2; Baker and Carey 2014). Thus, the G20 is an informal and agile body that cuts across and connects various IOs operating to create rules and ideas that underpin the global economic system, especially in order to be able to respond quickly to economic crises.

The fourth aspect of the G system’s evolving operation is the changing nature of its agenda and focus. While the agenda of the various iterations of the G system has always been open to the discretion of world leaders and has been affected by the urgent or high-profile issues leading up to the summits, the early meetings of the G system had a focus on economic diplomacy and financial coordination. Indeed, as previously noted, these forums were created as responses to various economic and financial crises. However, despite this original focus on economic issues, broader social issues have been discussed by leaders at various meetings, though these issues are often framed in relation to economic impacts and consequences. The informal nature of discussions has meant that issues ranging from terrorism, climate change and global health have been discussed at meetings across the history of the G system (Cooper and Thakur 2013: 3–4). The changing membership of the G system has also influenced the agenda, with issues such as development and food security rising in profile due to concerns and interests of emerging economies in the G20. The impact of civil society groups has also led to sustained attention being placed on issues such as corruption, climate change and the economic inclusion of women. Since the formation of the G20 as a leaders’ forum there are now a range of social issues that are persistent items on the G20 agenda.

As a result of these changing dynamics, the G20’s contemporary operation is shaped not just by the changing numbers and backgrounds of its member states compared with early iterations of the G system but also by a more complicated agenda and more institutionalised process, which, nevertheless, is still informal and non-legal in nature. Despite these developments, there has been little support for making the G20 more formal or expanding membership further. However, while the informal meetings of leaders remain the centrepiece of the G20, the activity of leaders has been supported by more sustained involvement by other actors. As such, the G20 is a clear exemplar of being an apex form of global summitry that plays a central role in the broader system of global governance. It not only includes the leaders of member states but also includes various forms of engagement with leaders of IOs, leaders from non-member states and experts and advocates involved the policy issues on the agenda. Consequently, since the creation of the G20 leaders’ forum, there has been the rapid development of more elaborate processes to inform the agenda of summits without creating a formal secretariat or adding new permanent members. These new processes include G20 working groups and the development of G20 outreach or engagement groups.

The G20 working groups encompass groups of experts and regulators from member countries within a specific policy area who are charged with preparing material for the deliberations of Sherpas and leaders. Such working groups have been involved with the G20 FM/CBG since its inception but have been elaborated significantly since the formation of the leaders’ forum. G20 working groups stemmed from the earliest preparation for the G20 FM/CBG. Indeed, one of the earliest experiments in creating a body to move beyond the membership of the G8 and include emerging economies in order to respond to the Asian financial crisis was the G22 (Group of 22/the “Willard Group”) in 1997 where:

ministers and governors commissioned three working groups to examine possible action in three areas: increasing transparency and disclosure; strengthening financial systems and market structures, particularly in emerging economies; and achieving appropriate burden-sharing between the official and private sectors in the event of a crisis.

(G20 History Study Group 2007: 13)

These largely transgovernmental groups of experts and regulators proved influential in the subsequent establishment of the G20 because the “success of the G-22’s working groups demonstrated the value of fresh, practical and less institutionally based dialogue and cooperation” (Kharas and Lombardi 2012: 3). It has become the standard practice that working groups are generally co-chaired by one advanced and one emerging economy. The operation of these working groups has a transnational aspect, due to the fact that they invite relevant experts from IOs, standard-setting bodies, business and academia. With the elevation of the G20 to a leaders’ forum, working groups have expanded into new areas of policy-making – removed from a narrow focus on financial issues – such as anti-corruption, development and employment. Indeed, the German G20 summit in 2017 had 12 distinct working groups (German G20 Presidency 2017a). In terms of scale, the 2018 leaders’ summit had 84 working group meetings in addition to the summit of leaders (Bery 2018: 8).

The G20 outreach groups demonstrate more recent transnational forms of engagement with a wider range of groups and networks not traditionally involved in the agenda or operation of G20 summits. These forms of engagement are trans-national in the sense that non-state actors are involved in activity that cuts across national boundaries. The predecessors of the G20 had various forms of intersection with the publics of member states, business interests and transnational civil society. These interactions were largely unsystematic. During the early years of the G7, organised business interests, such as the Trilateral Commission, were influential despite few official connections (Gill 1991). Also, while the G7 did not initially engage with civil society and the public, it became clear during the mid-1990s that globalisation was becoming an issue of public concern and that leaders had to address public fears about global capitalism operating beyond public control (Bayne 2000). These themes reappeared in the G8 summits during the 2000s in the form of substantial demonstrations associated with anti-capitalist movements. Nevertheless, various G8 summits had different forms of engagement or disengagement with civil society, with the 2001 G8 meeting in Genoa being an example of disengagement, and the 2005 Gleneagles summit being an example of more positive engagement via the G8’s consideration of civil society efforts to prioritise efforts to address global poverty (Cooper 2013: 188). Civil society groups were also more conscious of the potential impact of the G20 on their causes than they were with the G8 (Cooper 2013: 180). Furthermore, business interests became more organised in attempting to influence the G8 during the early 2000s, which culminated in the development of an annual meeting that has been held just before the G20 summit since 2010 (Koch 2016: 3–4).

Consequently, the G20 membership has also increased efforts to create formalised procedures of engagement and outreach with civil society and other sectors. The 2011 G20 Cannes Summit Final Declaration (G20 2011) stated that

we agree that, in order to strengthen its ability to build and sustain the political consensus needed to respond to challenges, the G20 must remain efficient, transparent and accountable. To achieve this, we decide to… pursue consistent and effective engagement with non-members, regional and international organisations, including the United Nations, and other actors, and we welcome their contribution to our work as appropriate. We also encourage engagement with civil society.

This recognition was demonstrated by the formalised development of the Think 20, Labour 20, Business 20, Civil 20 and Youth 20 at the 2013 St Petersburg Summit (G20 2013). In 2015, a Women 20 group and, in 2018, a Science 20 group were added. These networks have coalesced around the aspiration that G20 member states receive inputs from these various constituencies from a series of meetings prior to G20 summits on a wide range of topics (Koch 2016). These formalised outreach groups were created and organised by the state hosting the G20 and were repeated for subsequent summits after 2013 – although host governments have decided not to run some of the groups in some years. For instance, the Civil 20 process at the 2014 Brisbane Summit involved a website where people involved with civil society could select the issues that they thought the Civil 20 should focus upon and collate reports and perspectives about these issues. The Civil 20 held a two-day summit on the chosen themes, which included NGOs from Australia and around the world (Slaughter 2019a). This information was collated into a Civil 20 communiqué that declared the Civil 20 priorities which was subsequently submitted to the leaders of the G20 summit, alongside reports from other outreach groups.

The G20 follows the same informal logic as the G6 but is a significantly more elaborate form of summitry. It is certainly not simply a forum of world leaders or a concert of states. The G20 working groups and outreach processes have demonstrated that the G20 has taken on an increasingly complicated and institutionalised form where the informal discussions of leaders are supported by the work of many governmental and non-governmental actors. This leads to the observation that the G20 is a global summitry complex analogous to an “iceberg”, where there are considerable forms of formal and informal activity beneath the actual G20 summits (Alexandroff and Brean 2015: 9–10). At one level, the G20 is an international forum of the leaders of significant states at the intersection of geo-politics and geo-economics in an informal concert of states. At a deeper level, the G20 is a transgovernmental forum of various technocratic networks of member states and IOs, where officials can exchange perspectives and information with each other, including in the formally established G20 working groups. At an even deeper level, it is a transnational forum of policy networks that encompass experts and activists operating outside governments, who nevertheless involve themselves in the G20 policy-making process and attempt to have their interests and ideas heard by leaders and policy-makers. These transnational networks are especially evident in the development of the G20 outreach processes. Combined, these various forms of summitry represent complex forms of inclusion of different agents across world politics to develop a site of collective influence able to impart direction over the operation of global governance and stabilise globalisation. How these forms of activity have been created by the practice of various types of practitioners is important and outlined in Chapter 3. However, to understand the power and influence of the G20 requires considering these various levels of activity.

Power and the G20

While the G system’s membership has changed significantly and there has been substantial elaboration evident in the operation of the G20, the goal of promoting coordination with regards to the global economy has remained central to the purpose of the G system. From the earliest days of the G6 until the most recent G20 meetings, there has been the sense that informal discussions among officials and leaders played an important role in...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: legitimacy and the G20
• 1 The purpose and power of the G20
• 2 The legitimacy of the G20: international and public concerns
• 3 The G20 and the legitimation of global capitalism
• 4 The G20 and global social problems
• 5 The G20 and global justice and accountability
• Conclusion
• Bibliography
• Index