Accountability for Effectiveness in Global Governance by John Kirton and Marina Larionova
| Published date | 01 September 2019 |
| Author | Andrew F. Cooper |
| Date | 01 September 2019 |
| DOI | 10.1177/0020702019876380 |
| Subject Matter | Book Reviews |
by Japan, Korea, Germany, and Italy; the ways in which the digital revolution can
help control the crisis; and the fact that rapidly improving attribution science can
prove how climate change causes harm that people do see, feel, and smell. They
include political processes such as the rise of climate change as a top electoral issue,
the rise of the Green Party in Germany and Canada, bold leadership from French
president Emmanuel Macron, Greta Thunberg’s new-generation climate strikes,
and the growing acceptance of climate change as a financial risk. Above all,
Fiorino pays too little attention to global governance beyond that from the UN
dominated by non-democracies. It was the all-democratic Group of Seven that in
1979 invented the global governance of climate change, with one of the most ambi-
tious and effective control regimes the world has ever seen. Today, it is joined in
governing the global climate by the more globally inclusive Group of 20 systemic-
ally significant states, with its majority of democratic members now coming from
the Global South as well as North. They are led by India—due to host the G20
summit in 2022, and already responding nationally and internationally to the rising
heat and drought intensified by climate change. It is there, as well as in democratic
Indonesia, Brazil, and South Africa, that the hope for effective global climate
change control ultimately rests.
ORCID iD
John Kirton https://orcid.org/0000-0003-3354-8681
John Kirton and Marina Larionova, eds.
Accountability for Effectiveness in Global Governance
Routledge: New York, 2018. 290 pp. $155.00 (cloth)
ISBN: 978-1-4724-6691-4
Reviewed by: Andrew F. Cooper (acooper@uwaterloo.ca), Balsillie School of International
Affairs and the Department of Political Science, University of Waterloo, Canada
Accountability for Effectiveness in Global Governance is the latest in a series of
jointly edited books by John Kirton and Marina Larionova on global summitry.
The collection is ambitious in scope as it deals with the three major summits—the
G20, the G7/8, and the BRICS—and, although highly technical in some of the
chapters, opens up some key issues in global governance that merit attention from
a wider audience.
In terms of thematic structure, the opening chapters highlight the struggle of the
G20 to tackle two different (and often contradictory) agendas. On the one
hand, the chapter by Andrew Baker and Kateryna Dzhaha probes the difficulty
of the G20 in tackling financial regulation as the memory of the 2008 crisis fades
away. To their credit, Baker and Dzhaha want the G20 to step up in an
even greater ambitious mode of operation to deal with what they term the
paralysis of monetary policy (p.41). Unfortunately, however, the main vehicles
they point to as the agents of this re-mobilization, the working groups so
486 International Journal 74(3)
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