G8 Compliance Status

The Group of Eight (G8) is playing an active role in international arena today. The G8 annual summit attracts the global attention progressively. G8 is an informal international conference mechanism, including summits, ministerial meetings, finance minister and central bank governor meetings, private sector high level meetings, special working group meetings and so on. This model of dealing with international affairs is often called into question, and even be seen as Talk Shop . In order to explain the effectiveness of G8, this paper attempts to study the compliance status of G8 summit commitments, seeking to provide a meaningful new perspective.Commitments refer to the specific welfare targets in the G8 summit documents, which are publicly expressed by leaders of every member countries and unanimously agreed on. Commitments must be discrete, sufficiently specific, and future-oriented. Compliance refers to keeping the commitments. Compliance is measured according to governmental actions designed to modify existing instruments within the executive branch to accommodate the commitments reached. Compliance is assessed according to the following criteria: official reaffirmation, internal bureaucratic review and representation, budgetary and resource allocations are made or changed, new or altered programs, legislation and regulations, and so on.Currently, climate change and energy security are two major issues of G8. In this paper, I study the compliance status of G8 summit commitments in the area of climate change, and discuss the fators which influnce the compliance status. Accoding to the study, the compliance status can be divided into four stages: initial stage (1975～1987), rising stage (1988～1998), receding stage (1999～2001), rapid growth stage (2002～2007). The overall trend of G8 compliance status is growth. Although there are many twists and turns around, the compliance still advance towards the direction of higher compliance rate.There are the reasons for complying with G8 summit commitments. First, international norms are acknowledged and internalize, and the responsibility to address climate change is strengthened. Second, the institutionalization of the summit and ministerial meetings is strengthened, providing an important framework and platform. Third, leaders'personal commitments can impel them to take the initiative to comply the commitments. Fouth, political stability and public opinion also affect government compliance.The compliance status shows the effectiveness of G8 as a international system. As an informal international conference mechanisms, G8 is playing an increasingly important role in global governance, and even can deal with the problems which the United Nations can not solve. China can gain some illumination from it to choose the paths of participation in global governance.