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Explaining Compliance with G8 Financial and Development Commitments: Agency, Institutionalization and Structure.

Under what conditions do small, select, lightly institutionalized summit-level groups of the rich principal powers, rather than large, multilaterally inclusive, heavily organized, legalized and bureaucratically-driven bodies combining states of the rich north and poor south alike, induce their members to comply with their international financial commitments, and those more broadly related to development? To provide an answer, this paper examines the record of compliance with financial and other critical development related commitments by the members of the Group of Seven and now Eight (G8) summit since its 1975 creation. Particular attention is directed at the compliance record of the most powerful member, the United States. Both realist students of international politics focused on relative capability, and scholars of comparative politics highlighting America’s independent Congress and central bank, would both expect the US to have low compliance whatever the agency, international institutional context, or international system structure might be. This paper first examines the compliance trend over time, by policy area, and by country and then assesses existing explanations of compliance behaviour. It next assembles new evidence on compliance with G8 financial and development commitments from 1996 to 2005, and finally explains these patterns by focusing on three clusters of causal variables. The first cluster relates to agency – the ways G8 leaders construct commitments at their annual summit by embedding “compliance catalysts” designed to increase compliance. The second relates to institutionalization, notably whether “precommitment,” “recommitment” or “post-affirmation” of essentially the same commitments by all the G7 Finance Ministers at their meetings increase compliance. The third relates to structure, notably the financially related vulnerabilities bred by globalization, and the relative capabilities of major powers in the world. This analysis focuses on how much freedom agents, through their informal institutions, have to increase compliance and thereby constrain powerful states in a world of far reaching changes in vulnerabilities and capabilities. It concludes that there is some scope for conscious agency and institutionalization in constraining the allegedly unilateralist single superpower or hyper hegemonic US, and inducing it to be a compliant plurilateralist, especially in an age where globalization has bred a common intervulnerability that systemic shocks bring home to all.