This volume reflects the diverse perspectives presented on each of the major governance groups that contribute directly and indirectly to the G20 political process. It examines how these groups interact and what the outcomes have been of such interactions, including a fresh concept for the organization of a G20 system.

This volume is the result of a 2013 conference held by the Asan Institute for Policy Studies (South Korea) on the 'middle power' countries of Mexico, Indonesia, the Republic of Korea, Turkey and Australia (MIKTA). Experts and policymakers discussed how members of the MIKTA can work to advance global governance in emerging global issue areas.

In this paper I argue that middle powers that are members of the G20 can extract substantial benefit from their participation in the G20 if they have both a clear long term vision of global economic governance and a plan of action that is based on obtainable short term objectives. In the article I address four issues. The first is that the institutional arrangements for global economic governance will remain unstable until the current process of changes in the balance of global political and economic power plays itself out. The second is that, given the changing international power dynamics, the current “manager” of the global economy, the G20, is unlikely to be a stable entity. Consequently it can only be effective if it focuses on the relatively narrow range of economic issues of common interest to all G20 members. Third, middle-size countries need a long term vision of global financial governance to guide their conduct in the G20 and other forums of global governance. Fourth, the middle powers will only be able to capitalize on whatever short term opportunities may arise from their participation in the G20 if they identify a set of achievable short term objectives and devise a strategy for reaching them.

This book offers the most thorough, detailed inside story of the preparation, negotiation, performance, and achievements of G20 gatherings from their start at the finance level in 1999 through their rise to become leader-level summits in response to the great global financial crisis in 2008. Follow the moves of America’s George Bush and Barack Obama, Britain’s Gordon Brown and David Cameron, Canada’s Stephen Harper, Germany’s Angela Merkel, and other key leaders as they struggle to contain the worst global recession since the Great Depression of the 1930s. This book provides a full chapter-long account of each of the first four G20 summits from Washington to Toronto with summaries of the ensuing summits. It uses international relations theory to build and apply a model of systemic hub governance to back its central claim to show convincingly that G20 performance has grown to successfully govern an increasingly interconnected, complex, crisis-ridden, globalized twenty-first century world.

The Long Battle for Global Governance charts the manner in which largely excluded countries, variously described as ‘ex-colonial’, ‘underdeveloped’, ‘developing’, ‘Third World’ and lately ‘emerging’, have challenged their relationship with the dominant centres of power and major institutions of global governance across each decade from the 1940s to the present. The book offers a fresh perspective on global governance by focusing in particular on the ways in which these countries have organised themselves politically, the demands they have articulated and the responses that have been offered to them through all the key periods in the history of modern global governance. It re-tells this story in a different way and, in so doing, describes and analyses the current rise to a new prominence within several key global institutions, notably the G20, of countries such as Brazil, China, India and South Africa. It sets this important political shift against the wider history of longstanding tensions in global politics and political economy between so-called ‘Northern’ and ‘Southern’ countries. Providing a comprehensive account of the key moments of change and contestation within leading international organisations and in global governance generally since the end of the Second World War, this book will be of great interest to scholars, students and policymakers interested in politics and international relations, international political economy, development and international organisations.