Document(s) 1 of 21

Early Meetings

The journey to project definition began with an October 26–27, 2003, meeting at the University of Waterloo. The purpose of that meeting was to have an initial discussion with a group of authors who had been commissioned to put flesh on the bones of the ideas put forward by Paul Martin (who began the session with some informal remarks). The meeting was attended by a diverse group of 45 academics, policy professionals, and sitting officials from national and international organizations.¹

As a goad to debate, participants had before them the Smith/Carin paper already mentioned. Apart from making the case for the uniquely valuable role of government leaders, the paper quickly reviewed some of the more obvious global challenges (trade negotiations, climate change) which needed addressing and which the current institutional architecture seemed incapable of moving forward. The paper then opened discussion on organizational aspects of the L-20 idea, including questions such as which states should be represented and how the new group might operate. The last topic was “how to get there from here?” – in other words, even if the proposal for a new L-20 gained general acceptance, what steps would be required to implement it?²

The Waterloo meeting proved to be a useful first step in defining the problem and sketching out its different dimensions. It quickly became evident that there was general support (if not unanimous enthusiasm) for the notion of establishing a leaders-level grouping based roughly on the dimensions of the existing G-20 Finance Ministers. The concern at the performance of existing institutions (the United Nations system, the Bretton Woods bodies, the G-7/8) was pervasive. The sense was that these organizations were ineffective, ill-designed for dealing with contemporary issues and, perhaps most importantly, illegitimate. The accelerated, freer movement of capital, goods and services across national boundaries known as globalization would be untenable if the institutions purporting to make global-scale decisions remained a rich-nations “club”. Leaving aside ethical considerations, the rapid emergence of countries such as China, India and Brazil made maintaining the status quo impractical.

After an inconclusive discussion of the possible impact of a new L-20 on the old G-7/8 or G-20 Finance Ministers, there was an equally wide-ranging but open-ended debate around the composition and mandate of an L-20. Clearly, the emerging critical question was the focus of this new group’s work. Who was at the table, how they got there and how frequently they returned, all largely depended on which topic was tackled first.

Six weeks later, a similar somewhat smaller meeting occurred in the salubrious surroundings of Bellagio, in Italy. With a new cast of characters, this meeting took up the threads of the discussion begun in Waterloo. Many of the same points were canvassed, with particular emphasis on the need for transparency and accountability if the new body was to acquire credibility. The paradox inherent in seeking to enfranchise the global South while not co-opting its separable interests prompted debate. Participants surveyed the possible impacts of an L-20 on existing arrangements and bodies (such as an already debilitated UN system). This led in turn back to pragmatic concerns over how to launch the initiative, what criteria to use to select L-20 members and what their initial agenda should be.

The Bellagio meeting ended with agreement on materials to be prepared for a “go/no go” meeting scheduled for the end of February 2004. In addition to the series of background papers already commissioned, it was agreed that six short scenario papers would be drafted to focus the February discussion on the specifics of issue areas where a potential L-20 could break deadlocks or improve global governance.³ The stage was set for a session which would determine whether this project deserved to survive.

Project Launch

The sun was bright, the air was crisp and cold, and the skaters were gliding along the Rideau Canal on February 29, 2004, when 44 assorted experts and practitioners from around the world met at the brown bunker which houses the Department of Foreign Affairs in Ottawa. The task at hand was to establish whether the L-20 proposal merited more detailed study – and incidentally to report to the proposal’s conceptual godfather, Paul Martin, who was now housed in the Prime Minister’s residence, a few blocks farther down Sussex Drive.

The session began with a discussion of six subject areas which a group of 20 leaders might potentially discuss,⁴ and went on to explore ways in which an L-20 might be brought into existence. [The full text of all background papers prepared for the L-20 project can be found on the project website at www.L20.org.] At the end of the day, the participants dined with the Prime Minister.

The first scenario paper, Agriculture Subsidies and the Doha Round: A Role for the G20, was prepared by Diana Tussey, Director of the Latin American Trade Network, FLACSO (Facultad Latinoamericano de Ciencias Sociales), Argentina. She suggested that the North/South membership of an L-20 might make it an ideal instrument for breaking the Doha trade negotiations round deadlock centred on agricultural protectionism. She also saw the group as a useful forum for linking debt and trade subsidies issues. This view was countered by those who felt that, at this stage, the agricultural trade issues were too highly charged in terms of domestic politics (and probably too technical) for leaders to be able to make much progress.

The second scenario paper, The Orderly Resolution of Financial Crises, by Ngaire Woods, Director of the Global Economic Governance Program and Fellow in Politics and International Relations at University College, Oxford, examined the ways in which an L-20 meeting would add value to global policy affecting the resolution of debt crises and whether this should occur at the ministerial or the leaders level. The paper leaned towards involving leaders directly. In responding to the scenario Woods canvassed, participants agreed that inclusion of Southern countries would shift the centre of gravity of discussion away from the single-minded concerns of the sovereign debt creditor nations. Progress by Finance Ministers was sufficiently slow that leaders needed to become engaged.

The third scenario paper was prepared by David Victor, Director, Program on Energy and Sustainable Development, at Stanford University. It was entitled Roles for a G20 in Addressing the Threats of Climate Change? Victor argued that an L-20 could deal with one of the critical deficiencies in the climate treaty system – that it is too inclusive (it involves too many countries) and has spawned unmanageable complexity. He suggested that a smaller group of nations could move the whole process along by focusing debate and innovation, by becoming a crucible for new ideas which could eventually be applied more broadly. Participants expressed concerns about the impact of this approach on existing processes, and about whether the US could be brought to take part in the wake of their rejection of the Kyoto framework. There was debate over whether climate change issues were either too technical or too political to be dealt with by leaders at this juncture, and some questioned the ability of the Northern and Southern leaders at an L-20 to reconcile their very different interests and experiences on this subject.

The fourth paper was by Tim Evans, the Assistant Director-General of the World Health Organization, and covered The G20 and Global Public Health. He suggested three ways in which an L-20 could contribute in the health field: redressing errors of omission (including failures of leadership); promoting scale efficiencies in cooperation (especially with regard to medications and vaccines); and catalyzing complementary action beyond the health sector. Despite some doubts about an L-20’s ability to make decisions which would affect many countries not at the table, the majority of participants felt that global health issues would benefit from the group’s attention.

The fifth area to be addressed with a scenario paper was security. Paul James’ piece (James is Professor of Globalization at RMIT University, Australia), The G20 as a Summit Process: Including New Agenda items such as “Human Security”, argued in favour of broadening the definition of security to include such “human security” issues as health, development and debt as well as military clashes. He also suggested including in L-20 deliberations in a regular fashion non-state actors, transnational bodies and international institutions. Some participants doubted whether leaders could productively engage on issues of good international citizenship and questioned whether much had been learned since the genocide in Rwanda. Others worried about the potential impact on the authority of the United Nations, and about the practical ability of the group to react constructively to emergencies.

The final topic was global financial problems. The scenario paper, Would the Outcomes of a G20 Process Differ from those of the G7?, was written by Ariel Buira, the Secretary-General of the Intergovernmental Group of 24 on International Monetary Affairs and Development (known as the G-24), a group of developing countries who work together on monetary and development finance issues. Buira concluded that the addition of major developing countries to the G-7 would broaden the leaders’ agenda and lead to improvements in the workings of the international economy. Among the topics which the L-20 could address were global payments imbalances, counter-cyclical policies, managing financial market volatility, international liquidity and Special Drawing Rights allocations, and commodity shocks. There was disagreement among participants over the likelihood of overcoming the strong Northern bias of existing international financial institutions, but some saw hope that an expanded leaders’ group would bring more accountability and greater representativeness to deliberations over the key issues Buira enumerated.

Coming out of the review of the six scenario papers and of an additional series of background papers on the interests and concerns of specific countries, three potential agenda items seemed likely to reward L-20 consideration:

• health,
  
  
• climate change, and
  
  
• safe drinking water and sanitation.

Interestingly, the last topic emerged spontaneously from the general debate and was not the subject of a paper.

The meeting moved on to considering how to bring the L-20 idea to actual fruition.⁵ Matters such as group composition, relationships with existing bodies (for example, if an L-20 is established, what happens to the G-7/8?), and ways of managing the process leading to the first L-20 meeting were canvassed, with few definitive conclusions reached. Underlying the “celestial mechanics” required to move the concept forward, however, was the primordial issue of legitimacy.

The consensus was clear that the existing G-7/8 simply was not sufficiently representative to ensure that developing countries and the broader public would regard their decisions as reflecting global interests as a whole. Similar concerns of Northern domination attached to the Bretton Woods institutions, especially the International Monetary Fund. At the other end of the scale of inclusiveness, the United Nations and its subsidiary bodies were simply too large and diverse to allow for credible analysis and meaningful action. The hope, in the words of Paul Heinbecker, former Canadian Ambassador to the UN, was that for the new L-20, “…its legitimacy in the eyes of both its members and others not formally part of the group would derive from its effectiveness in bringing about change”.⁶

In light of the concerns over legitimacy, it was perhaps not surprising that one of the most pointed debates revolved around the question of civil society participation. Put plainly, a sizeable contingent believed that global issues were fundamentally the responsibility of national governments, that those governments had the task of ensuring that they credibly represented the full range of opinion within their countries, and that the addition of special interest groups to an L-20 process would inevitably lead to a bureaucratic nightmare. Countering this deep skepticism about the civil society role were those who believed that the “democratic deficit” in international governance mechanisms was so great that it needed to be redressed promptly. A related area of interest was the suggestion that national parliamentarians might have a role to play and that a network of think-tanks from L-20 countries might be established to support the new group’s work.⁷

The February 2004 meeting served its purpose. The L-20 proposal survived a searching preliminary examination, and the determination was made that a series of regional meetings should follow. These workshops would focus on a succession of problems which shared the characteristics of being globally important, requiring more or less immediate action, and being currently deadlocked in their existing institutional settings. In order to identify which topics would be practically and politically attractive for inclusion on an initial L-20 agenda, the subjects for the regional workshops would have to meet a number of criteria. They would need to be capable of generating a value-added initiative which other bodies would not likely be able to produce. This initiative would include a workable solution composed of a forward-looking suite of actions and undertakings offering a win-win-win outcome for L-20 countries and others. These tangible results would be characterized by substantive, broad-based benefits, realistic and acceptable financial mechanisms and organizational feasibility. Legitimacy would be conferred through adequate representation, particularly by the presence and buy-in from the United States and the major developing countries.

The First Round of Workshops

Following on from the discussion in February, CFGS and CIGI organized an initial set of workshops over the next six months (see Table 3.1). The workshop subjects corresponded fairly closely to the six topics for which scenario papers were originally prepared. The only alteration was that the financial issues were addressed in one workshop and, on the basis of the exchanges at the February meeting, a new topic, “Safe Drinking Water and Sanitation”, was given a workshop of its own.

Table 3.1 L-20 meetings – phase 1

The pattern for these workshops (and for the ten which eventually followed) was standard. Prior to each meeting, background research was conducted to clarify the “problem”, to better understand the effects at international level, and to identify the various and potentially divergent national interests that have made the issue intractable. A group of experts (academics, policy professionals, and officials from national governments and international organizations) was then formed, with consideration to geographical and gender representation. The meetings were deliberately kept to a manageable size (20–35 participants) to encourage easy exchanges and constructive debate. The “Chatham House rule” (no attribution of remarks outside the meeting) was adopted to ensure frankness.

For each meeting, a background paper was commissioned from a leading expert briefly summarizing the issue status, diagnosing the obstacles to and opportunities for progress, and highlighting core challenges and priorities from the perspectives of both developing and industrialized nations. This analysis set the framework for several other authors to write briefing notes in the form of “conjectural communiqués” on specific aspects of the issue and to point the way to a package of initiatives which L-20 leaders might adopt. All these papers included a political assessment of the necessary scope of a package deal. At the end of the day or day and a half meeting, conclusions were agreed to, and in the following days a meeting summary was prepared. All these summaries appear on the project website at http://www.l20.org/ 

These detailed examinations generated a range of outcomes in terms of the possibility of a potential focus for L-20 activity. Some issues were adjudged to be inappropriate for L-20 consideration, some seemed more likely and others needed “re-framing” to work.

The Oxford meeting in June 2004 on agricultural subsidies concluded that an L-20 could act to push for a liberalization of agricultural trade, enhance the capacity of the poorest countries to benefit from trade, and monitor how trade is affecting the poorest people and countries. It was determined, however, that this topic was not suitable for an inaugural L-20 meeting. An agenda item on this subject was deemed premature because the failure of the Doha Round had not yet been acknowledged and the issues remain bedeviled by a morass of technical information.⁸

By comparison, participants in New York in September 2004 were enthusiastic about the possibilities of an L-20 meeting on climate change. In the interests of “marketing” considerations, however, it was decided that reframing “Climate Change” to “Energy Security” would lend itself more favorably to global buy-in and cooperation.

Energy security was deemed an actionable and effective L-20 topic for three reasons.

• First, energy security cuts across the normal responsibilities of line ministries and requires package deals to emerge above the level of individual ministers – deals only heads of state can forge.
  
  
• Second, existing international institutions do not lend themselves well to tackling issues of energy security.
  
  
• Third, energy security offers significant high-profile possibilities for progress which would allow the L-20 to demonstrate its significance and effectiveness.

For example, many cross-cutting issues can be addressed under the larger rubric of energy security of supply. “Hard security” issues, such as territorial protection and supply of vital fuels, can be linked to “soft security” issues, such as protection of the environment generally, and specifically the limitation of the emissions that lead to global climate change. In fact, the demonstrable need to reduce emissions can be uncoupled from the larger (and divisive) climate change debate because countries have an obvious immediate self-interest to act (for example, related to health). An L-20 could also articulate long-term goals and strategies, set targets to control rises in temperatures, emissions and concentrations of green house gasses, and focus on practical and flexible actions to be implemented by countries working unilaterally but also in coordination with others.⁹

Similarly, the management of infectious diseases was determined by the San Jose, Costa Rica, meeting in November 2004 to be a suitable and urgent L-20 topic, with a rich and robust likelihood of success.¹⁰ Participants agreed that, since health is at the top of national and international agendas, leadership from the top is required to tackle broad and diverse issues, drive inputs from across hitherto uncoordinated sectors, and forge alliances to realize scale efficiencies. Coordination and cooperation across nations is necessary to tackle a problem which transcends borders and continents.

The key finding was that there was a lack of communication and coordination channels and mechanisms between the World Health Organization (WHO) and the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO). This deficiency is especially of concern with respect to dealing with avian influenza. New mechanisms needed to be built between public health authorities and veterinary/animal health authorities at all levels. An L-20 decision would be the most effective way to prompt action to fill this gap. Plans for a follow-up conference were initiated, an event which led in turn to the meeting of international Health Ministers in the fall of 2005, hosted by Canada.

The next workshop, in Alexandria, Egypt, in December 2004, concerned safe drinking water and sanitation, the subject which had emerged unbidden earlier in the year. This meeting produced ideas of how an L-20 could catalyze action, mobilize global public opinion, facilitate the upgrade of capacity and technology, provide affordable financing, and lead, coordinate and monitor progress. There was strong agreement that on its merits this topic justified a leaders’ summit. Specific elements for a win-win-win L-20 package were delineated but, mainly because of issues of timing and related political factors, it was determined that water is not an immediate prospect for an L-20 meeting. The main structural concern was that, while the problems and many of the solutions are universal, the responsibilities are highly decentralized and largely localized. Leaders would have a hard time gaining purchase on water and sanitation issues in a group setting.¹¹

At Princeton later in December, issues related to terrorism and weapons of mass destruction (WMD) were addressed in more detail. This constellation of problems is a threat recognized by all nations, and one of the biggest issues facing the United States. Participants noted that, although countries might disagree with respect to the magnitude of the danger and how best to deal with it, all countries agreed that addressing WMD proliferation was unavoidable. Participants suggested that an L-20 might develop a series of practical recommendations to unite developed and developing countries and sectors within them. A workshop was scheduled in the project’s next phase to refine an approach along these lines.¹²

The original title for the next workshop, held in Mexico City in January 2005, was “financial crises”. Participants ultimately concluded that a better title for this potential L-20 agenda item was “global economic security and prosperity”. The notion was that the L-20 could help focus on social issues and broader policy directives, and give ideas on how better to manage global economic systems. Although this subject might perhaps not be best suited for a first L-20 meeting, an L-20 group might eventually take up the task of giving guidance and direction on a set of issues related to global economic security and stability. Many technical aspects would properly be left to other actors (i.e. ministers and senior officials), but political pronouncement on roles and goals may be necessary to give the required impetus. On balance, the likely reflex of Finance Ministers to defend their own policy “turf” made the issue an unlikely item for a first meeting of L-20 leaders.¹³

Endnotes

¹ Waterloo, pp. 1–2.

² Barry Carin, Gordon Smith, Making Change Happen at the Global Level. L-20 project paper, 2003 http://www.l20.org/ p. 28.

³ Bellagio, pp. 6–7.

⁴ Ottawa I, pp. 5–9, for the discussion of the six scenario papers.

⁵ Ottawa I, pp. 26–33.

⁶ Ottawa I, p. 26.

⁷ Ottawa I, pp. 30–32.

⁸ Oxford, p. 10.

⁹ New York, p. 5.

¹⁰ San Jose, p. 8.

¹¹ Alexandria, p. 8.

¹² Princeton I, pp. 1–2.

¹³ Mexico City, p. 5.

Document(s) 1 of 21