Explaining G20 Summit Success

After eight summits in five years and with the ninth coming to Brisbane within the year, it is important to ask how well and why G20 summits have worked. This paper argues that the G20's rising performance has been driven first by steadily escalating shocks in finance, economics, terrorism, energy, the environment, food and war, whose sources have shifted from emerging Asia to an established but newly vulnerable United States, Europe and the Middle East. Unlike its many international institutional competitors, the G20 alone contained as full, equal members the countries that increasingly possessed the collectively predominant and internally equal capabilities required to respond to such shocks. Its members also increasingly, if unevenly, became more open, democratic polities, driven by economic growth within, globalization without and G8 guidance and G20 socialization in between. The G20 further benefited from the domestic political control, capital, continuity and competence of its participants. It increasingly became a club that its members valued, at the hub of an expanding network of global summit governance for a globalized world.