Document(s) 7 of 21

Gathering International Support

By early 2005, the L-20 idea was gaining momentum. The initial series of six subject-focused workshops had narrowed the field of likely topics for consideration at a first L-20 summit. Although no conclusions had been reached about possible L-20 composition and procedures, the ground had been cleared for a more detailed discussion.

The world outside the L-20 project was not standing still, however. Others recognized the need for international institutional reform. Late in 2003, Klaus Schwab, the President of the World Economic Forum (the organizers of the annual Davos meetings of international movers and shakers) had called for a new global group composed of ten developed nations, ten developing nations and the Secretary General of the UN to address twenty-first century challenges. This “P21” (Partnership 21) idea resembled, in simplified form, the L-20 approach.¹ In June 2004, Jim O’Neill and Robert Hormats (the latter a Sherpa or Sous-Sherpa for the first eight G-7 summits) published an analysis in the Goldman Sachs series of Global Economics Papers in which they specifically endorsed Prime Minister Martin’s suggestions for a G-20 at leaders level.²

Then on January 27, 2005, the Helsinki Process on Globalization and Democracy published a report called “Governing Globalization – Globalizing Governance”. This unusual Process was created jointly by the Finnish and Tanzanian Governments in December 2002 to promote the involvement of Southern and civil society perspectives on global policies “…in search of novel and empowering solutions to the dilemmas of global governance”. Clearly, the Helsinki Process was based on a rather different worldview than that of the worthies at Davos and Goldman Sachs.

Nonetheless, the outcome had familiar elements. The January 2005 report reflected one track of the Process and featured a proposal for a “representative summit for economic stewardship”. Specifically, the report recommended:

…the replacement of the G-7/8 with a broader grouping, a G-20 (or thereabouts) annual summit of the heads of leading governments from the North and the South. This informal leader-level group should assume a sense of responsibility for the functioning of the world economy and its principal institutions.³

The report went on to suggest that the group be supported by a troika of past, present and future chairs, a systematic “sherpa” process for preparing meetings, and an extensive prior dialogue to develop membership criteria. Apparently, wherever one stood on the ideological spectrum, the mechanics of international leadership were badly in need of renovation.

In the meantime, in December 2004, from the centre of the multilateral world, the Report of the UN Secretary-General’s High-Level Panel on Threats, Challenges and Change weighed in.

There still remains a need for a body that brings together the key developed and developing countries to address the critical interlinkages between trade, finance, the environment, the handling of pandemic diseases and economic and social development. To be effective, such a body must operate at the level of national leaders…. One way of moving forward may be to transform into a leaders’ group the G-20 group of finance ministers…⁴

Mindful of all this context, L-20 project organizers scheduled a stocktaking meeting for February 19 and 20, 2005. The program included an informal “report back” to Prime Minister Martin, part of which consisted of an innovative package of briefing videos in which six potential L-20 agenda items were described and assessed.⁵ The stocktaking session itself reviewed the results of the six project workshops and concluded that a second round – in some cases delving deeper into topics already canvassed; in other cases examining new potential agenda items – was warranted.

In the wake of the meeting, Paul Martin published an article in the May/June edition of Foreign Affairs entitled “A Global Answer to Global Problems”. The article laid out the case for an L-20, particularly stressing the personal role of government leaders –

An L-20 should get political leaders doing what they alone can do – making tough choices among competing interests and priorities.⁶

Drawing on the discussions at the workshops, the article cited development issues, the threat of terrorism, and international public health concerns as potential subjects for L-20 action. The Prime Minister undertook to continue talking about the approach in his ongoing meetings with counterpart heads of state and government.

The Second Round

As part of the gradual winnowing down of potential L-20 topics which characterized the project, the February 2005 stocktaking meeting took agricultural trade and financial crises off the table, concluded that no further work was required on water and sanitation issues, but left open the possibility of additional discussion of climate change (re-framed as energy security), infectious diseases (refocused on pandemics) and WMDs.

The next set of workshops began with a flurry of four in May, 2005 (see Table 4.1 for a list of the second phase workshops). Two of these concerned reform of the United Nations system. This subject was particularly current because the UN was deep into self-examination (not to say self-doubt) as the “oil-for-food” scandal unwound messily and preparations moved ahead for a major summit in September 2005 to review progress five years after the establishment of the Millenium Development Goals (MDGs). In keeping with the organization’s primordial vocation of producing paper, a number of major UN reports appeared late in 2004 and early the next year.

In December 2004, the Secretary-General’s High Level Panel on Threats, Challenges and Change issued a report entitled A more secure world: our shared responsibility. This report set out a vision for collective security in the new conditions of the twenty-first century and included a proposed working definition of terrorism.⁷ Then in January 2005, the UN Millenium Project Report appeared – Investing in development, a practical plan to achieve the Millenium Development Goals. In this report, a team led by Jeffrey Sachs catalogued a series of specific steps to reach the MDGs by the designated target date of 2015.⁸

Building on this work, and with an eye to the coming UN World Summit in September, Secretary-General Kofi Annan issued in March 2005 In Larger Freedom: Towards development, security and human rights for all.⁹ This document attempted to synthesize the key security, human rights and development issues addressed in earlier reports and recommended institutional reforms which would reinvigorate the UN system. The Secretary-General set out a four-part, detailed plan which he hoped the Summit would accept as a package. In his statement delivering the report to the General Assembly, he ended with a plea for action which betrayed as much frustration as it did hope.

This hall has heard enough high-sounding declarations to last us for some decades to come. We all know what the problems are, and we all know what we have promised to achieve. What is needed now is not more declarations or promises, but action to fulfil the promises already made.¹⁰

The first two L-20 events in May, in Brussels and Tokyo, took as their background paper a conference report from a meeting of current practitioners, leading academics, civil society representatives and United Nations officials which CIGI had organized at Waterloo at the beginning of April.¹¹ The Waterloo meeting focused on the Secretary-General’s report, and canvassed ways of bringing his recommendations to reality. The L-20 workshops continued the debate with two more mixed groups of academics and practitioners. Although many participants raised the possibility of an L-20 acting as a catalyst to UN reform, realistically, the likelihood was never high that the group would even exist prior to the key UN summit in September. In the event, the Brussels meeting issued a joint statement endorsed by CFGS, CIGI, the European Policy Centre and the International Crisis Group, calling for a package of eight of the Secretary-General’s recommendations to be adopted by the UN summit.¹²

Just to finish the story, the World Summit duly occurred on September 14–16, 2005, after a prolonged wrangle over the wording of the commitments to be adopted. US concerns were so great that they offered alternative wording in late August which essentially gutted the document. Eventually, a statement was agreed to which either “offered nothing new” or “gave new momentum to the MDGs”, depending on one’s view. The overall assessment seemed to be that the Summit produced few tangible results compared to the original intent, but at least generated continued support for the MDGs themselves. One major achievement from a Canadian perspective was the acceptance of the “responsibility to protect”, a concept which Canada has played a key role in developing and promoting. So the UN survived to fight another day, but disappointment was in the air, and the mechanics of global decision-making seemed as ineffectual as ever.

Following up from discussion at the stocktaking meeting, two more workshops were held in May 2005 – one on pandemics (Geneva) and the other on fragile states (Berlin).

The pandemics workshop built on the earlier infectious diseases workshop in November 2004, and participants were categorical in their conclusions. They believed that authorities were generally unprepared – there were huge gaps in what should be a seamless web of surveillance activities, vaccine stocks were inadequate, and there were drastic medical personnel shortages. Participants confirmed that no bridges existed between public health and agricultural veterinarian personnel. Institutional barriers between them needed to be removed, and agricultural veterinarians must be included in an upgraded early warning system. Only leaders could jolt the system into building bridges and pooling risks and efforts. Leaders must catalyze action across health, agriculture, trade and finance ministries domestically and across the WHO, FAO, WTO and the Bretton Woods institutions internationally. In short, participants agreed that pandemic disease was a safe issue for a first L-20 meeting, given the dimensions of the underappreciated threat, the inadequate infrastructure and response capacity, and the risk of very high personal and economic loss occasioned by border closings and quarantines.¹³

The Berlin workshop produced a different sort of result. The general topic of fragile states had come up as a possible L-20 agenda item at the February 2004 launch meeting in Ottawa (mostly in the context of conflict prevention and post-conflict reconstruction). At Berlin, there was consensus about the importance of that particular set of problems (i.e. how to deal with fragile states) and about the need for more to be done in a more comprehensive fashion. On the other hand, there was no consensus on what had to be done. Some participants felt that there was a potential role for an L-20, at least in prompting a dialogue between developed and developing states or in bringing together experts as a resource for international and regional organizations dealing with fragile states. Overall, however, the conclusion was that this was too complex a topic for an inaugural or early L-20 leaders meeting – there were too many pitfalls. If ever an L-20 were well established, aspects of the issue might be brought up for consideration.¹⁴

The final series of L-20 workshops generated similar mixed results. The six subjects they addressed were undoubtedly important to the international community but, for a variety of reasons, and to varying degrees, they were “not ready for primetime” in terms of how an L-20 might operate. In particular, with the possible exception of energy security and WMDs, they did not seem likely to generate agenda items suitable for achieving the kind of high profile “quick win” which a new body would need early in its life to justify its continued existence.

In October, 2005, a workshop convened at Stanford University in Palo Alto to discuss climate change issues, reframed as “energy security”. The group found that energy security was an elastic concept, but one with great potential for generating collective international action. It offered the prospect of linking “hard security” issues (such as territorial protection and supply of vital fuels) in mutually reinforcing ways with “soft security” issues (such as protection of the environment generally and, specifically, the limitation of the emissions that lead to global climate change). Such linkages, which could notionally engage a large number of countries and diverse interests, seemed to make energy security a good prospect for early consideration by the L-20. Moreover, security of energy supply was once again high on the agenda of most governments because of the current high prices for energy, notably oil. Politically, action was needed not only because consumers demanded it but also because a large and growing fraction of the world oil supply was under the direct control of governments who make supply decisions primarily on the basis of political factors.

All of which being said, participants emerged with some doubts about how (or whether) to accommodate the long list of energy issues they had considered on an L-20 agenda. A package deal on energy security would be immensely complex and, to a degree, subject to the vagaries of the moment (e.g. the security situation in the Middle East). Many energy and climate change-related issues entailed very long time horizons, a characteristic which made them uncomfortable for politicians to deal with. Out of the list of issues considered, it proved impossible to provide a clear picture of priorities, or even clarity, on the continuing role for an L-20. For the moment, while promising in terms of importance and timeliness, the energy security field needed more work before either a package of elements or a single overriding concern could be put forward as a credible agenda item for leaders to “crunch”.¹⁵

Later in October, a workshop on international fisheries governance took place in Victoria, Canada. The conference examined the prospects for an L-20 to address the issues surrounding global over-fishing. In this regard, the main governance problem was the emergence of “illegal, unreported and unregulated” fishing. Political will to act was constrained by the over-capacity in many fleets (not only limited to OECD countries), the lack of domestic incentives to restrain capacity, the failure of national management systems, and the existence of subsidies. In brief, governments were faced with short-term political pain in confronting the issue of too many fishers chasing too few fish.

The conference revealed a tension between two approaches. One view was that fisheries management should be viewed as an issue of fisheries governance, and that countries should simply get on with better implementation. The competing view was that it was fruitless to push for implementation within the framework of existing regimes and declarations. Instead, catalytic action would be provided only by widening the frame and pursuing over-arching environmental regulation. Bold steps were required to apply a new standard of rights and ethical obligations to the oceans and their resources. In the end, participants concluded that an L-20 Leaders forum could make significant headway by committing to a laundry list of activities (e.g. pursuing implementation of existing commitments; promoting the use of trade and market measures to improve enforcement and promote compliance; improving the effectiveness of regional fisheries management organizations, and reducing domestic over-capacity in fishing fleets and technologies) which were undoubtedly useful but hardly the stuff of headlines. Certainly, fisheries governance was not a first generation L-20 agenda item.¹⁶

The next workshop took place in circumstances which linked the discussions directly to the “real world”. The meeting in Petra, Jordan, in November 2005 took place on the day after the hotel bombings in Amman. The tragedy underlined the immediacy of the concern to address the roots of such actions. Participants discussed the problem of the competing objectives for official development assistance (ODA), reviewed the criteria for a successful L-20 discussion of ODA, and identified options for framing the question for L-20 consideration.

Participants agreed that, from the perspective of leaders, ODA was a means to other ends, beyond the general goals of poverty alleviation and economic growth. For action by government leaders, the debate should be reframed to focus on the most appropriate specific global problem (e.g. pandemics, climate change, trade negotiations) to which to apply a reoriented approach to “development cooperation”. Leaders were likely only to be interested in development assistance as a key potential contributor to resolving a particular priority issue they are faced with. Within this context, the staff work leading to a possible L-20 session must sharpen the incremental contribution leaders could make to harnessing development aid to particular global objectives and to increasing the effectiveness of cooperation. One option was to pitch the meeting as a stocktaking, where leaders reviewed deadlocks and failures in several of these global issue areas and sug­gested an appropriate reorientation of development cooperation aimed at breaking the impasse.

Participants discussed the various criteria for selecting among the possible issues of interest to leaders. The value proposition was that leaders would examine coherent options of using ODA very differently, packaged with other measures, to make substantive progress on a global scale. This being said, however, and even as integrated into discussions of specific global issues, ODA was not a topic which would fit easily on the agenda of an initial L-20 meeting.¹⁷

The January 2006 workshop following Petra had a similar sense of immediacy, since it picked up on an earlier meeting (Princeton, December 2004) on terrorism and the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction (WMD). The 2006 meeting was held at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory’s Centre for Global Strategic Research in California and focused more on international regimes to control proliferation.

Participants noted there was no question that technology rendered the proliferation of WMD easier, but the rate at which this happened was not as rapid as many thought. Nuclear weapons in particular remain technologically challenging and, unless turned over by a state in a manner in which they could be used, were unlikely to be in the arsenal of non-state actors anytime soon. There were, however, fewer secrets and more accessible technology in the biological and chemical fields.

It was important to distinguish between state and non-state actors. Different regimes needed to apply, even though there is a link, as states could supply non-state actors. States inevitably want to survive, including the persons in the regimes that rule them. Non-state actors could be nihilists as well as indifferent to their own death. The response to an attack from terrorists was problematic. Retaliation on a specific target or set of targets could often be impossible; hence, deterrence does not work.

With regards to the concept of the L-20, some viewed the creation of another institution as unnecessary; however, the view was also expressed that the proposal was less for an institution and more for a high level network. A discussion ensued about the relative merits of the Security Council compared to an L-20. Most agreed that, with membership reform and changes in the criteria for setting the agenda, the Council could be effective (issues of representation, performance, and legitimacy needed to be addressed together). Leaders do have crucial roles with all WMD issues and serve to connect emotionally and politically with various audiences. Many of the failures in handling WMD issues are linked to a failure of leadership. The conclusion agreed by all was that better networks were needed. The need for the highest level political leadership was also stressed. Those closest to Washington DC made clear, however, that this would not lead inevitably to creation of an L-20.¹⁸

In February, the project returned to Princeton University’s Woodrow Wilson School of International Affairs to explore potential future arrangements to finance “global public goods” and, specifically, whether an L-20 could produce value-added action in this regard.

As described in the background paper prepared by Inge Kaul and Pedro Conceicao,¹⁹ international cooperation on financing global public goods is beset by a “twin deficit”: first, the implementation deficit, that is, the disjuncture between the forging and the implementation of international agreements; and second, the participation deficit, which at present keeps key state and non-state actors away from both the negotiating table and the operational implementation of international cooperation. Participants reviewed the trends leading to a reduction in these two “deficits”.

It was argued that the international system needs a new approach that treats financing cooperation as an investment and provides a stimulus to innovative financing technologies.²⁰ Operationally, this approach would generate a body that could package global policies and encourage cross-bargaining across issue areas. Also required were an issues manager to provide coordination and an issue custodian to provide the requisite continuity. The question was whether an L-20 could meet some or all of these challenges.

Among the reasons to be skeptical of an L-20 process were: the likelihood that most problems would solve themselves without the intervention of leaders; the great difficulty of bringing the US to an L-20 table (unless a significant element of the group’s work was of specific American interest, e.g. reconstruction of Iraq); the fact that investments in most global public goods projects have amortization periods of 10–25 years, while governments find it very hard to look much beyond 2–3 years; and the concern that there would be no legal basis for the L-20 as there is, by contrast, for the Security Council. By conference end, it was clear that innovative though this focus on global public goods was, the subject did not lend itself to a first-round L-20 agenda.²¹

The final workshop centred on a specific subject was held at Maastricht in the Netherlands in March 2006 and concerned exploiting science and technology (S&T) for development. The aspirations and interests of developing countries were foremost, as they were at most of the second round workshops. Participants addressed the questions of the importance of S&T for development relative to other potential agenda items and why leaders should be involved. The challenge was the opportunity cost – to explain why funds should be diverted to S&T from direct approaches to provide current needed services or from the core agenda of fighting poverty. The counterargument was that most serious poverty problems have a serious S&T component, while only a small proportion of global R&D is directed towards the concerns of the poor.

Action at an L-20 level might help achieve positive outcomes in clarifying and endorsing new directions to be taken, plus providing encouragement to the local actors who must pursue them. L-20 action might reinforce implementation of the Paris Declaration on Aid Effectiveness – in particular, harmonizing donor approaches to supporting key areas of S&T-related action at the country level. Nevertheless, participants thought it difficult to “embed” S&T into a leaders meeting agenda – it was hard to envision the prior process needed to inject specific S&T issues. The case for S&T was complicated by its crosscutting nature; S&T was a means to achieve the whole spectrum of Millennium Development Goal outcomes. The role of S&T was subsumed into discussion of many topical issues of interest, such as avian flu and land degradation/desertification which have higher profiles. Participants observed that, while highlighting S&T as an important element in resolving development issues was possible, “S&T for development” as a topic in itself would not sell.²²

With the Maastricht meeting completed, much energy and time had been devoted to the subjects which an L-20 Leaders group might usefully address. With one or two exceptions (notably energy security and controlling WMDs), few of the second round workshops resulted in consensus on items which could credibly be placed on an initial L-20 agenda.

In the course of this survey of potential agenda items, however, two major themes kept recurring, and these deserve separate examination. The first of them concerned the question of how the United States might be brought to engage in this enterprise in the first place. The second concerned issues of global fairness.

Endnotes

¹ For a slightly later account of the Schwab proposal, see the report in Business Line of a February 10, 2004 speech in India. Retrieved May 10, 2006 from http://www.thehindubusinessline.com/2004/02/11/stories/2004021102130500.htm

² Jim O’Neill, Robert Hormats, The G8: Time for a Change. Global Economics Paper No: 112, 2004, Goldman Sachs, p. 9.

³ Helsinki Process on Globalization and Democracy, Governing Globalization – Globalizing Governance: New Approaches to Global Problem Solving. Finnish Ministry of Foreign Affairs, 2005, pp. 16–20.

⁴ United Nations, A more secure world: our shared responsibility. Report of the United Nations Secretary-General’s High-level Panel on Threats, Challenges and Change, United Nations, New York, 2004, A/59/565, p. 73. It is of interest that Brent Scowcroft, former National Security Advisor to Presidents Ford and George H.W. Bush, was a member of this panel.

⁵ The videos can be found on the L-20 website http://www.l20.org/

⁶ Paul Martin, A Global Answer to Global Problems. Foreign Affairs, May/June, 2005, http://www.foreignaffairs.org/ 

⁷ United Nations Report (2004), op cit.

⁸ United Nations, The Millenium Development Goals Report, 2005. United Nations Department of Public Information, New York, 2005, DPI/23990.

⁹ United Nations Secretary-General’s Report, In larger freedom: Towards security, development and human rights for all. United Nations Department of Public Information, New York, 2005.

¹⁰ Secretary-General’s Statement to the General Assembly, New York, March 21, 2005. Retrieved May 11, 2006, from http://www.un.org/

¹¹ Waterloo II.

¹² Brussels.

¹³ Geneva.

¹⁴ Berlin.

¹⁵ Stanford.

¹⁶ Victoria. Although fisheries would not seem an obvious candidate for action by leaders, Paul Martin reported that in the course of talking to counterparts about the L-20 concept, he found that every single leader thought fisheries issues were important. He suggested that this was another way in which the world looked different to leaders than to Ministers or officials. Paul Martin personal interview, August 30, 2006.

¹⁷ Petra. As a consideration in this regard, Paul Martin observed subsequently that in his experience leaders tended to place greater emphasis than other players in the development assistance field on the importance of establishing and maintaining local order and security. Paul Martin personal interview, August 30, 2006.

¹⁸ Livermore.

¹⁹ Inge Kaul, Pedro Conceicao, The L-20: an Important Beginning of a New Era of International Cooperation? L-20 project paper, 2006, http://www.l20.org/.

²⁰ Kaul and Conceicao, op cit., p. 6 notes the following with respect to these new financial techniques.

“While a wide range of new policy approaches and financing instruments for international cooperation have become available, many of these new and often quite innovative tools require further testing as well as advocacy. For example, it would be desirable to explore—and evaluate—more systematically such instruments as global public-private partnerships that could act as implementing agencies for particular issues and employ instruments like securitization or differential patenting that the conventional intergovernmental organizations are typically not able to use. Similarly, innovative financing technologies may have to be encouraged either by making supportive statements (in the way that the G-7 have done with collective action clauses and, more recently, with advanced purchase commitments) or by stimulating the development of pilot projects (such as the UK-led International Finance Facility for Immunization).”

²¹ Princeton II.

²² Maastricht.

Document(s) 7 of 21