Document(s) 12 of 21

Given these two models for initiating the run-up to the first L-20 meeting, what would some of the practicalities associated with this new body look like?

Composition – One More Time

The original proposal discussed prior to the workshop series was to invite the countries represented on the existing G-20 Ministers of Finance group (see the chart in Appendix B). This combination brought on board most of the large and economically significant developing countries. Working from an established list had the merit of avoiding a prolonged wrangle over who should be invited. Countries left out might be upset, but at least there was an explanation for who was included.

Once workshops began examining individual subject areas, however, participants had differing views about composition, depending on the subject matter. Participants at the Oxford workshop on agricultural trade thought that the agenda should dictate the make-up and size of the leaders group, and entertained notions of having regional organizations (e.g. ASEAN or the African Union) nominate countries.¹ At the Alexandria meeting on safe drinking water, the view was that the L-20 should include the G-20 membership plus Nigeria and Egypt. The Petra workshop also noted that the G-20 under-represented Africa.² The concept of “flexible geometry” re-surfaced at the Princeton workshop on global public goods and was re-visited at the Washington DC discussion of international institutional reform and global governance. In both cases, the approach was that there should be a core group of 12 (the existing G-8 plus China, India, Brazil and South Africa), which would be supplemented by six or eight other countries, depending on the topic to be discussed.³ It should be noted, however, that in both meetings there were those who thought that having a fixed membership was important, in order to foster the personal relationships which would allow for compromise and encourage breakthroughs.⁴

Typically, while L-20 project participants laboured away in their workshops, the real world was providing an example of the shape of things to come. Great Britain was the host for the July 2005 Gleneagles Summit of the G-8, and Prime Minister Blair took advantage of the privilege of the Chair to broaden the meeting by inviting five key developing countries – Brazil, China, India, Mexico and South Africa. Not only did the “Five” issue a Joint Declaration at the beginning of the Summit⁵ but, prior to it, they had worked with the “Eight” to establish a Dialogue on Climate Change, Clean Energy and Sustainable Development, a commitment to which was enshrined in the Gleneagles Communique.⁶

In fact, the “G8+5” had been the moving spirit behind a meeting of Energy and Environment Ministers from 20 countries (note the magic number!) in March 2005, as part of the preparations for the Gleneagles Summit. This Energy and Environment Ministerial Roundtable produced the impetus for the Dialogue which Gleneagles itself eventually launched. Just to confirm that “20” does not mean the same thing on all occasions, it is worth noting that the Ministerial Roundtable included Spain, Poland, Nigeria and Iran, while Russia, Argentina, Turkey and Saudi Arabia, all members of the Finance G-20, were left out. The precise membership, of course, is less important than the fact that it was thought useful to bring together a representative group of about twenty countries from North and South to deal with a critical set of issues. In this case, at least, “variable geometry”, complete with a “core group”, seems alive and well.⁷

By comparison with the view generally held at the beginning of the L-20 project, when the notion was to attempt to establish a twenty-member group from the start, the current consensus seems to have gathered around the idea of starting with a smaller group championed by key sponsoring countries (for example, China and the United States),⁸ and building on that to address specific issues. In practice, assuming the first meeting is successful, the make-up of the “20” at the following summits may vary considerably, as the subject matter dictates.

Linkages to Existing Institutions

The fact that the G8+5 assumes the expansion of an existing body (the G-8) raises the general question of how an L-20, whether it starts life as a smaller group or moves straight to its larger conformation, manages its linkages with international organizations which already exist. Workshop participants had a range of views.

At Oxford, there was no desire for an L-20 to take over the complicated technical task of managing the Doha Trade Round directly. Instead the idea was that the leaders would provide an impetus to negotiations.⁹ A similar purely catalytic role for the L-20 was envisaged at Mexico City and Washington DC (with respect to reform of the Bretton Woods institutions), Geneva (with respect to the full panoply of health-related issues dealt with by the World Health Organization, the Food and Agriculture Organization, the World Trade Organization and the IMF/World Bank), Maastricht (with respect to the various international organizations dealing with development assistance), and Victoria (with respect to the Regional Fisheries Management Organizations).¹⁰

It is indicative of the prevailing mood that the Gleneagles Communique makes very clear that the newly minted Dialogue on Climate Change, Clean Energy and Sustainable Development was not designed as a substitute for negotiations on future action in the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). In the wake of that Summit, the Gleneagles Dialogue Core Script circulated by the UK Government categorically stated –

The UNFCCC is the only place where agreement can be reached on future action.¹¹

For a variety of reasons (notably the generalized unwillingness to spend more taxpayer money on international bureaucrats and the suspicion that institutions have no incentive to solve problems and do themselves out of business), institution-building of the heavy duty kind is not currently fashionable. For most L-20 project participants, the main job for an L-20 would be to make existing institutions work better, not to invent new ones.

All of which being said, at some workshops, including the Alexandria meeting on safe drinking water and sanitation, there was a willingness to contemplate new institutions, specifically, in Alexandria’s case, establishment of a Global Water Agency.¹² By comparison, however, and probably more characteristically of the workshop series as a whole, participants discussing fragile states in Berlin maintained emphatically that no new institutions be invented for the purpose of meeting the special needs of those states.¹³

The body most directly threatened by the L-20 concept, of course, is the G-8 itself. Project participants never reached agreement on whether the L-20 was a useful adjunct to the G-8 (which would continue meeting and developing its own agendas even after the L-20 sprang into being), or its logical successor. As a practical matter, this is probably not a question which requires definitive resolution prior to an initial L-20 meeting, assuming one ever occurs. Prime Minister Blair’s attempt to institutionalize the G8+5 approach, however, gives a noteworthy signal that, as presently constituted, the G-8 simply does not have the representativeness to address global issues in a credible fashion.¹⁴

Launch Options and Operating Procedures

When it came to contemplating the circumstances under which the L-20 might be launched, project participants considered both the idea of billing the first meeting as a one-off attempt to deal with a pressing global problem, or as the first of a series. By the end of the workshop series, the former approach had won out, essentially for pragmatic reasons. Even if a series was actually planned, the organization of a single summit was a high enough hurdle in itself. With effectiveness would come the demand for more L-20 meetings. It was noted that even the Rambouillet Summit in 1975 was intended by the French as a unique occasion, and only President Ford’s enthusiasm resulted in the Puerto Rico Summit in 1976, which was followed by the run of annual leaders’ meetings which even now continues as the G-8.¹⁵

The assumption throughout the project (perhaps because so many former Sherpas were involved) was that, for an L-20 to come to pass, the good offices of a collection of personal emissaries from the leaders would have to work together to finalize arrangements, including the critical matter of an agenda. With respect to whether the L-20 should have a secretariat, and, if so, of what size and permanence, the overall verdict seemed to be that the administrative overhang should be kept to a minimum.¹⁶ In particular, participants (and Paul Martin) wanted leaders to be able to discuss issues directly and frankly with each other, free from programmed position statements. The recurrent (partial) exception to this was the concern that enough organizational memory be generated to ensure that the commitments made by leaders were actually implemented. The report-back function and the attendant benefits of continuity were seen as critical to the usefulness of the L-20.¹⁷

Outside Consultation

As discussed in Chapter 5, project participants reached no definitive conclusions about the role of outsiders with respect to L-20 deliberations. Although there was sensitivity about this new grouping being seen to be inward-looking, nontransparent and elitist (and, indeed, according to the Helleiner critique, illegitimate), many participants were wary of opening the L-20 too directly to public pulling and hauling from civil society. Certainly there was no particular appetite to transform the L-20 into some sort of quasi-constituent assembly.

Once more, however, practitioners have moved the discussion ahead by developing a working model for outside consultation, a version of which might eventually be applied to the L-20. On February 24, 2006, an announcement was made in London by GLOBE (Global Legislators Organization for a Balanced Environment) and COM+ (The Alliance for Communicators for Sustainable Development), jointly launching a 3-year dialogue on “Climate change: Looking beyond 2012”, focused on agreeing to alternatives beyond the Kyoto Protocol.¹⁸ This dialogue will “shadow” the Gleneagles Dialogue up to the Tokyo Summit in 2008. The first forum of this parallel group met on July 7 and 8, 2006, and its conclusions were conveyed to the G-8 Summit at St. Petersburg later in July.

The Globe/COM+ dialogue draws together legislators from the G-8 countries plus India, China, Brazil, Mexico, South Africa, Spain and Australia and international business leaders, civil society and opinion leaders. In addition to having the personal endorsement of Tony Blair, this effort is supported by the World Bank, whose Vice-President for Sustainable Development sees the dialogue as “…contributing to the generation of a new space of interaction which will complement the intergovernmental process”. Some of this “space” will consist of at least two annual international forums, as well as specific country forums in China, India and the US. An International Advisory Board will meet twice yearly. The Dialogue Series aims to provide a venue outside international structures for legislators, senior business leaders, civil society, and opinion leaders “…to discuss post-2012 scenarios (when the Kyoto Protocol expires) without the restraint of a formal government negotiating position”. It also expects to generate greater understanding of different country priorities and “…how any future political accommodation could be reached”.

Leaving aside the rather daunting verbiage of the press release, and the exhausting prospect of yet more international meetings, this sort of well-intentioned but elaborate consultative machinery could be adapted to the uses of an L-20. This being said, it might be fairer to all concerned (including the summit leaders) if the pretence of broad inclusion were dropped in favour of the usual forms of civil society input via national governments. The last thing a new L-20 needs is to generate another layer of public cynicism about the “democratic” nature of summits.

Network of Think Tanks

At the beginning of the L-20 process, consideration was given to how best to generate the innovative ideas which a group of leaders might find useful as they tried to break deadlocks and animate moribund international institutions. Building to a degree on Anne-Marie Slaughter’s scenario paper about the importance of networks, the proposal was floated that a network of think tanks from the L-20 countries might provide this kind of policy research capacity for leaders.

At the launch meeting in Ottawa, creation of such a network was proposed; it would contribute to the process without necessarily attending summits.¹⁹ This notion reappeared from time to time during the workshop series, including at the Petra meeting in November 2005 on improving official development assistance. There, the suggestion was that, in the event of a successful first L-20 meeting, a small coordinating office would be established. Among other functions, this office could have a pot of resources to commission studies by an L-20 network of think tanks.²⁰

As it turns out, that think tank network has already been set up de facto. CFGS and CIGI were fortunate to have distinguished partners for each of the workshops around the world (see Appendix C) and, as the project has evolved, so have the connections within this group of institutions – from the Global Economic Governance Programme at Oxford University for the first workshop to the Brookings Institution for the last. As the project moves forward to its next incarnation, the embryonic L-20 network of think tanks can be called upon to continue the creative process of proposal, counter-proposal and debate which has animated this search for new ideas in global governance.

Endnotes

¹ Oxford, p. 9.

² Alexandria, p. 8; Petra, p. 5.

³ Princeton II, p. 2; Washington, p. 5.

⁴ There would of course be a degree of “natural” turnover due to elections and other forms of regime change.

⁵ Joint Declaration of the Heads of State and/or Government of Brazil, China, India, Mexico and South Africa participating in the G8 Gleneagles Summit Introduction. Retrieved June 24, 2006 from http://g7.utoronto.ca/summit/2005gleneagles/plusfive.pdf.

⁶ The Gleneagles Communique. Retrieved June 24, 2006 from http://www.g7.utoronto.ca/summit/2005gleneagles/communique.pdf

⁷ Judging by his op-ed piece in the May 27, 2006 Globe and Mail newspaper, Prime Minister Blair now believes that the G-8 should meet as the G8+5 on a regular basis as “the norm”.

⁸ Fairly early in the process, Chinese authorities indicated to Paul Martin that if the U.S. were willing to join an L-20, they (the Chinese) would be prepared to co-host the first meeting with them. Certainly the Chinese have been adamant throughout that they are completely uninterested in being yet another add-on to the G-8. Helping to co-found a new global gathering, however, seems more to their taste.

⁹ Oxford, p. 10.

¹⁰ Mexico City, p. 4; Washington, p. 6; Geneva, p. 1; Maastricht, p. 6; Victoria, p. 5.

¹¹ Gleneagles Dialogue Core Script, September 21, 2005; retrieved June 25, 2006 from http://www.seen.org/pages/g8/GleneaglesDialogue.pdf

¹² Alexandria, p. 5.

¹³ Berlin, p. 2.

¹⁴ The one country which will continue to defend the “unique” character of the G-8 is Russia, which has only just made it into the club. On the other hand, the EU may eventually see the larger L-20 as the only way in which Europe can continue to be over-represented. Finally, the G8 +5 may simply not go far enough because it does not contain a single Islamic country.

¹⁵ Only President Ford’s personal friendship with Prime Minister Trudeau (and the former’s desire to lessen the European monopoly of the table) led to Canada’s inclusion at Puerto Rico.

¹⁶ An interesting variation on this theme was the outcome of the Alexandria workshop on safe drinking water and sanitation, which envisioned a graduated approach, depending on the scale of the leaders’ plans. At one end there would be a fairly simple secretariat, but at the other end would be the foundation of a free-standing Global Water Agency. Alexandria, p. 11.

¹⁷ Princeton II, p. 4, where the precision was made that the L-20 Chair should have a 2 year term, and the past, present and future Chairs should manage the L-20’s business (as a Troika). It should be noted that in the wake of the Halifax Summit in 1995, Canada pioneered the practice of chairing the first post-summit Sherpa meeting as a way of ensuring follow-up. This procedure has been followed ever since.

¹⁸ For the text of the press release, retrieved June 26, 2006, see http://www.wbscd.org/plugins/DocSearch/details.asp?type=DocDet&ObjectId=18258. “GLOBE is a network of individual legislators around the world that seeks to educate parliamentarians on environmental issues and promote policies supporting sustainable development.” “The COM+ Alliance is a partnership of international organizations and communications professionals from diverse sectors committed to using communications to advance a vision of sustainable development that integrates its three pillars: economic, social and environmental. By offering a platform to share expertise, develop best practice, and create synergies, COM+ hopes to actively support creative and inspiring communications across the world to bring sustainable development closer to the public.”

¹⁹ Ottawa I, p. 32.

²⁰ Petra, p. 6.

Document(s) 12 of 21