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This article examines and explains the outreach activity of the BRICS group of Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa. We focus on two research puzzles: a) the motivations and b) the form and degree of the institutionalization of BRICS outreach. We define outreach as collaborative interaction among BRICS and other actors within and outside the BRICS area and focus on outreach to governments of non-BRICS countries and national top officials representing regional organizations. First, we offer a theoretical framework based on the experiences of the Group of 7/8 (G7/8) and the Group of 20 (G20), considering both commonalities and differences with BRICS. Second, we provide a detailed empirical analysis of BRICS outreach over time. Third, we explain BRICS outreach in light of the theoretical framework and enrich it based on our findings. Methodologically, we draw empirical information from official documents, news media and academic literature. We argue that the outreach activity of a major power grouping is reflective of its internal cohesion, as well as of how it defines its own position in the world and how it is perceived by others. This research offers a timely contribution to the ongoing debate on BRICS and the under-researched BRICS outreach process as a part of the overall institutionalization of BRICS.

This article investigates the BRICs’ involvement in the adoption of Automatic Exchange of Information (AEoI) by the G20 and the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) as a maj...

This chapter investigates the introduction of Medium-Term Revenue Strategies (MTRS) in developing countries as part of technical assistance for tax capacity building. The MTRS concept was devised by the Platform for Collaboration on Tax and is supposed to be a holistic high-level roadmap for tax policy reform around which civil society and external aid donors can coordinate. Tax capacity building for domestic resource mobilization has become a crowded governance field over the last decade with multiple bilateral and multilateral partners involved, sometimes in the same country. While there have been multiple high-level coordination efforts, within-country coordination is still lacking. As such, we investigate the concept’s usefulness as a coordination tool for donors to ensure their assistance is matched with a country’s needs and preferences. We also critically examine the concept’s potential pitfalls and deficiencies in terms of scope and ambition, partners, and legitimacy. We conclude that if the MTRS is evaluated as it is intended, an additional tool in the larger toolbox of coordination in the tax capacity building regime, the concept holds promise but calls for close scrutiny to ensure that they are truly country-owned and country-specific roadmaps.

By geography, the EU and Turkey are destined to be strategic partners. Yet, the relation is in a bad shape. This essay argues that neither can afford this. There are two keys to an improved relationship. The first is that President Recep Tayyip Erdogan and the governmental Justice and Development Party (AKP) use their unprecedented power to kick-start a long overdue domestic pacification process, and put the country back on track towards a pluralist democracy. The second is that the EU and other western partners begin to appreciate the shared responsibilities for the deepening democratic deficit in Turkey, including their own. Both keys are linked in an intriguing way.

The purpose of this article is to reveal how two organizations from the OECD system—the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development and the International Energy Agency—are maneuvering strategically to retain their focal places in the regime complexes that developed around taxation and energy, respectively. It argues that their bid for leadership and centralization is built on the comparative advantages they enjoy as institutions; namely, their historically accumulated expertise and distinct working methods, their close ties with the Group of 8, and their rapidly developing relationships with emerging powers. Notwithstanding these institutional assets, a revision of the OECD's membership could further cement and legitimize the central role of the OECD system in these regime complexes.

The global financial crisis moved the International Monetary Fund (IMF) back to the center stage, after some years of disengagement by major emerging markets and developing countries (EMDCs). Neo-liberal institutionalism predicts that crises in a highly interdependent world induce states to strengthen multilateral institutions. In the case of the IMF, many observers believed that a more effective IMF was contingent on giving EMDCs a larger voice. However, the 2010 Quota and Governance Reform at the IMF fell below expectations in this regard. On the basis of an analysis of the ex ante preferences and power relations of the major players, we show that this should not come as a surprise and that the 2010 reform agreement has reached the boundaries of the politically possible. Hence, this empirical case study brings in power and preferences to qualify the more optimist neo-liberal institutionalist accounts against the backdrop of an increasingly multipolar world.

In recent years, the G8+5 system has proven to be a major focal point of international cooperation in the field of energy efficiency. The G8 has set up multiple dialogues and collaborative frameworks with five emerging economies (China, India, Brazil, Mexico and South Africa) on energy and energy efficiency. The most prominent initiative so far is the creation of the International Partnership for Energy Efficiency Cooperation (IPEEC) in 2009. This article critically evaluates these joint efforts between the G8 and the ‘Plus Five’ on energy efficiency. More specifically, the purpose of this article is (1) to frame and explain the emergence of this kind of great-power cooperation; (2) to map G8+5 collaboration on energy efficiency; and (3) to provide a critical assessment of the relevance, impact and results of G8+5 initiated energy efficiency initiatives. The main conclusion is that the G8+5 system has performed better on the external dimension (steering global governance) than on the internal dimension (coordination of domestic policies) of global energy efficiency governance.

Ill-conceived tax policies cost developing countries vast sums of public revenue, but this issue has received relatively little attention within the Financing for Development (FfD) process of the United Nations. The outcome documents of the FfD conferences in Monterrey (2002) and Doha (2008) largely neglect globalisation-related tax issues such as under-taxation of multinationals and capital flight to tax havens. This article analyses how this topic has been marginalised by powerful interests, ideas and institutional factors, but it also shows how a growing coalition of governments, international organisations and NGOs has recently succeeded in raising the issue much higher up the international agenda.

Although it is widely recognized that today’s multiple energy challenges need to be tackled through internationally coordinated action, global energy governance has remained largely underdeveloped. Since the 2005 Gleneagles summit, however, the G8 has issued several ambitious energy action plans and declarations. Through its language and actions the G8 appears to claim a “leadership” role to fill the void in global energy governance. This article critically examines the G8’s actual value added in this field. It comes to a nuanced conclusion. Admittedly, the G8 has initiated several substantive processes. It has, for instance, revamped the International Energy Agency by expanding its scope beyond merely monitoring oil markets, and it has played a critical role in setting up a new international organization in the field of energy efficiency. Yet, in general, the G8 has failed to exert global political leadership, mainly because of internal divergence, lack of compliance monitoring, and nonmembership of major countries.

Despite the mounting scholarly interest in processes of institutional change in international organizations, still very little is known about how and when such evolutionary dynamics occur. This article hopes to contribute to this young, yet growing body of literature by process-tracing the changes that have occurred in the institutional setup of the International Energy Agency (IEA). Founded during the first oil crisis of 1973–74, the IEA has had to deal with major environmental changes over its lifetime. In response, the agency has diversified away from its original raison d’etre, namely managing an emergency oil sharing mechanism, to become a more proactive policy adviser guiding its member governments toward sustainable energy economies. The article seeks to explain the observed patterns of change and inertia, using a theoretic paradigm that builds on theories of “new institutionalism.” The paper argues that the agency’s institutional flexibility can only be fully explained by taking into account a combination of factors: (1) the member states’ choices, in particular the impulses of the G8-members of the IEA; (2) path dependency, especially the institutional link with the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD); and (3) agency by the secretariat and the executive bureau of the IEA.

The simultaneity of globalisation and the rise of powers such as China, India, Brazil and South Africa are raising fundamental questions about the aptness of the contemporary global governance architecture. A few years ago, former Canadian Prime Minister Paul Martin proposed a “Leaders' 20” or “L20” as an apex body for global governance. After having put the L20 proposal in theoretical and historical perspective, the paper investigates structural trends in favour of the L20 proposal as well as obstacles to it. Taking into account the challenges the world's powerful states are facing, an enlargement of the G8 looks inevitable. But thus far the obstacles appear to be even stronger. The paper concludes by elaborating on the idea that neither conducing elements nor obstacles are deterministically given.

In the years and decades after 1944, the United States (US) took the lead in constructing a grand liberal multilateral order (Ikenberry, 2001; Patrick, 2009). This US-sponsored global architecture covered both security and economic affairs. Some institutions were created immediately after World War II, such as the Bretton Woods institutions and the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT). Others came later and were set up for different reasons - the monetary and oil crisis of the early 1970s, for example, spawned the G7 and the International Energy Agency (IEA). Many of these institutions had a truly global span, and even those that were confined to the Western camp often took on global aspirations after the end of the Cold War.

The rise of new powers such as China and India is sending shockwaves through the global multilateral system. Yet, not every multilateral institution is affected in the same way and many institutions have developed different responses to the global power shift. This volume is the first to systematically examine these different responses. It looks in detail at 13 multilateral institutions ranging from exclusive Western clubs (NATO, OECD, IEA, IASB, and G8) over global institutions in which rising powers are deprived of equal decision-making power (UN Security Council, IMF, and World Bank) to global institutions in which rising powers have equal decision-making power (WTO, WIPO, UNFCCC, CBD, and the G20). The contributors offer an interpretation of why some institutions are proving highly resilient thanks to the innovative outreach and reform activities they deploy, while others have more troubles to adapt as they become paralyzed by gridlock or even retreat from the global scene.

Introduction: new constitutionalism and taxation This chapter explores how the global financial crisis of 2008–9 has affected the stability of the ‘new constitutionalism of disciplinary neo-liberalism’ in the realm of international tax policy. New constitutionalism forms a principal institutional component of neo-liberal hegemony. In neo-Gramscian international political economy, neo-liberalism is understood as a political project aimed at restoring capitalist class power after the economic and social crisis of the 1970s (Harvey 2005; van Apeldoorn and Overbeek 2012). This project is undergirded by dialectically intertwined material, ideational and institutional components. In the material realm, the structural power of transnational capital is manifested by the predominance of international finance and transnational corporations in the global political economy. The cross-border mobility of these fractions and the associated ‘exit option’ discipline governments, parliaments and national trade unions to introduce and accept neo-liberal economic policies. Ideationally, neo-liberalism is characterized by the hegemony of pro-market, supply-side and monetarist discourses (van Apeldoorn and Overbeek 2012). However, militant neo-liberalism has to a certain extent been succeeded by the seemingly more politically ‘neutral’ globalization discourse, which pretends that states have lost a considerable deal of their actual sovereignty and that for nations there is no alternative (TINA) to adjusting to the exigencies of internationally mobile capital. In the institutional sphere, new constitutionalism firmly institutionalizes neo-liberal globalization. Stephen Gill (2008) defines new constitutionalism as the political project designed to anchor neo-liberal policies into national and international legal frameworks, insulating these policies from normal, day-to-day democratic debate and decision-making. As Gill has stated, the central goal of new constitutionalism is to firmly secure the protection of private property rights, and as such to transform public policy in the interests of mobile capital. What is emerging is a social order in which holders of that capital are conferred privileged rights of citizenship and representation, and in which these rights are ‘locked in’. In effect, ‘the mobile investor becomes the sovereign political subject’ (1998b: 25). Consequently, dominant economic forces, in particular wealthy individuals, transnational corporations and financial institutions, are ‘increasingly insulated from democratic rule and popular accountability’ ( ibid : 23), and, in the case examined here, from taxation.