ABSTRACT
The G7/8 Summit, held at Kananaskis, Alberta, on 26–27 June 2002, marked the culmination of the fourth seven-year cycle of G7/8 summitry and the 28th annual regular summit encounter since the start at Rambouillet in 1975. During its first 27 years, the summit had exhibited a wide range of performance, from an impressively high grade of A awarded for the 1978 Bonn Summit to a disappointingly low of E when Germany next hosted, at Bonn again, in 1985 (Bayne 2000, 195; Appendix B). During the fourth summit cycle, starting in 1996, annual performance had ranged from A– at Cologne in 1999 to only C for Genoa in 2001 (see Appendix E). From 1975 to 2001, the summit had produced a high of 169 specific communiqué-encoded commitments at Okinawa in 2000, but a low of only seven at San Juan in 1976 (Kirton, Kokotsis, and Juricevic 2002). Member countries had complied with these commitments only 30 percent of the time during the first 15 years (von Furstenberg and Daniels 1992), but 80 percent of the time by the 2000 Okinawa Summit. With such wide variability in past performance, there was much uncertainty about what the 2002 Kananaskis Summit would achieve.
