Next year’s battle of the summits

by Alex Evans | Nov 25, 2008 | Cooperation and coherence, Europe and Central Asia, Influence and networks, London Summit

As Gideon Rachman notes, the fact that the G20 has now staged a summit at the level of leaders rather than finance ministers – which by my reckoning made it a de facto L20 – means that “the venerable old G8 has a real challenger on its hands”.

In addition to the advantages that Gideon counts off – the G20’s novelty, its inclusion of emerging economies, the fact that the G20 has the earlier summit (G20 in April vs. G8 in July), the Berlusconi factor – there’s also the fact that Gordon Brown (who’s chairing the April G20) is already gearing up for a big push to make a success of the G20 and get the ball rolling in earnest on a Bretton Woods II agenda (c.f. David and my paper on this if you missed it).

Even before you consider the G20,  there are some big question marks over the G8.  What has it really delivered over the past decade since it enlarged from G7 to G8?  My count would go something like this: debt relief; the Proliferation Security Initiative; the Global Fund on AIDS, TB and Malaria; and the Financial Stability Forum.  Four credible initiatives, yes – but not much of a tally for ten years’ worth of summits, and also notable that none of these areas really involved any serious domestic implementation commitments.

Part of the problem here is the limited bandwidth of the ‘sherpa’ system that prepares the summit agenda before heads meet in the summer.  As I noted in a Guardian piece back in July, sherpas have pretty busy day jobs (like Permanent Secretary at the Foreign Office, or Private Secretary to the PM), which rather curtails their capacity to tee up major global deals as well.  It’s a case in point of the problem with moving issues to the leaders’ level: yes, you get the big picture, but at the cost of moving issues to the most over-stretched parts of governments. Hardly surprising that you’re more likely to end up with a media-friendly ‘initiative’ rather than a comprehensive long-term framework.

And perhaps it’s here that we come to what may be the real ace up the G20’s sleeve: its roots in the world of finance ministers. Like leaders, finance ministers have the big picture.  But unlike leaders, they also have big departments that already cover most of the global waterfront (apart from a few hard security areas like arms control) – and hence a great deal more analytical capacity for getting to grips with complex issues like climate change, trade and reform of the global financial system.

True, foreign ministries have big departments with lots of capacity too – but they have no way of forcing coherence on the rest of their governments when it comes to implementation.  Finance ministries, on the other hand, have a decisive advantage: while herding cats may never be easy, it’s a whole lot more manageable if you control the catfood.

Admittedly, the G8 has a Finance Ministers’ variant too – which has arguably achieved more in recent years than the leaders’ G8.  But co-ordination between the two G8 bodies hasn’t stood out as a strong point.  With the G20, Gordon Brown has a chance to forge a different, more effective relationship between the finance ministers’ and leaders’ levels; indeed, it would be hard to imagine someone better qualified to do so, given that as well as spending a decade as Finance Minister, Brown was chair of the IMFC for so long.