Barry Carin- Senior Research Fellow at the Centre for International Governance Innovation, Waterloo, Ontario, Adjunct Professor at the University of Victoria, British Columbia, N2L 6C2, 57, Erb St. W., Waterloo, Ontario, Canada, E-mail: bcarin@cigionline.org

David Shorr- Program Officer at the Stanley Foundation, IA 52761, 209, Iowa Av., Muscatine, USA; E-mail: dshorr@stanleyfoundation.org

Abstract

The presented article analyses the G20 effectiveness. The authors discuss negative evaluations of this international multilateral institute and analyse the G20 agenda management to improve its effectiveness. The tools used by the G20 are also thoroughly explored. The authors argue that not only traditional methods (e.g. fulfillment of the commitments announced in summit communiqués) should be used to assess the G20.

The authors suggest recommendations on improving the G20 effectiveness. First of all, the G20 should focus on priority issues: food security, commodity-price volatility, challenges of energy and climate change. 

To keep the G20 from being overwhelmed by persistent agenda creep, it should devise ways to sunset its involvement with certain issues, perhaps by handing off efforts on an issue to other bodies or spinning them off into self-sustaining initiatives. Such filters as governance gap, global implications, need for high-level attention, complementarity, clarity, proportionate scale are recommended to develop the G20 agenda.

In the authors’ view the real key to the G20 effectiveness is focusing all effort on the avenues that best rectify the given problem. The group can surely do better at contributing toward progress on the world’s urgent challenges, but the critique emphasizing distraction from its main business is neither a correct diagnosis nor a basis for constructive reform.