"The 8th G20 Summit kick-started in the Russian city of St. Petersburg on Friday (September 6). Major differences over military intervention in Syria threaten to overshadow the discussions on important economic issues. This gives us an opportunity to debate the need for a permanent secretariat to handle the G20 activities.
The G20 has come up as a useful platform for providing multilateral and cooperative solutions to the challenge of managing the world economy and the international financial system. Their decision on an impressive fiscal outlay and additional resources for the IMF and development banks helped avoid a global depression. To the G20's credit are also the establishment of the Financial Stability Board to advance regulatory reform of the financial sector, maintenance of an open trade regime against protectionist pressures, etc. The G20, at the leaders' level, is the de facto premier forum for international dialogue and cooperation on a holistic range of global issues.
Despite its several successes, the G20 is criticized for its dearth on governance. Since its elevation from a forum for Finance Ministers to Leaders of the countries', the scope and scale of the forum has undoubtedly broadened. Can the existing informal system continue to serve the purpose for which the G20 was created for? The G20 is essentially a government network which has neither a charter nor a secretariat.
The G20 currently relies on a temporary and rotating Chair nation. In2010, French President Sarkozy first raised the idea of a secretariat. Other G20 members like South Korea, Brazil and China among others are also pushing for a permanent secretariat and formal criteria for membership selection. One of the reasons for the effectiveness of the G20 was that it was able to reach on crucial agreements thanks to its informal structure that allowed for flexibility and adaptation for swift response.
On the other side, some G20 members, including the US, argue that the body should remain agile, with no heavy bureaucratic secretariat and with a narrowly defined and focused agenda, to enable quick responses in the times of crisis. As the United Nations illustrates, there is a trade-off between inclusive membership and the ability of the international body to come to quick, decisive and meaningful consensus.
Yet, fundamentally important aspects of the role of the permanent secretariat get missed out - to reduce the discretion of the presidency to set the agenda. Moreover, the G20 has to rely on other organizations, namely the IMF, to support its work. The IMF has been providing analytical and research capacity, especially in the area of surveillance and peer review, and also implementing G20 decisions. This raises fundamental questions for the IMF - is it appropriate for the IMF to spend so much time and resources to service the requirements of 20 nations, when this clearly does not come under its global mandate? This issue is bound to be raised by countries that feel left out of the G20 forum.
As for monitoring progress on objectives, two processes have been used: surveillance and peer review. So far, this has been limited to macro-economic policy coordination only, but as the areas of discussion are increased, to continue monitoring without a secretariat would become cumbersome and inefficient. Having said that, the role of the secretariat would need to go further than mere publication of indicators and their assessment against benchmark measures.
Despite the above mentioned reasons for the need of a secretariat, there is merit to the opposing voices too. By creating a permanent secretariat would absolve nations to actively participate in setting the agenda and would potentially be detrimental in terms of building ownership of change. Then, there is the issue of where the secretariat would be located. Canada, South Korea and France have indicated that they would like to host the secretariat, each with their own reasons.
With the IMF being viewed by developing countries with skepticism, the G8 unrepresentative of current global realities and the UN too large, the G20 has done well to fill the gap in an effective global governance model. The challenge is to manage and organise the summit to ensure continuity, institutional memory, and the implementation of plans and promises, when the international agendas' for the G20 are progressively increasing. It may not represent the entire planet, but it would be fair to assume that it has direct connections, economic and otherwise with almost all sovereign states. The effectiveness of the G20 as an international body would be greatly determined by the structure it chooses to pursue.
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