A Progressive G20 Presidency in a Volatile World

As the dust settles on the progressive South African Presidency of the G20, stock-taking begins. The last in a series of G20 Presidencies hosted in the Southern Hemisphere, the first African presidency of the G20 faced Sisyphean odds. Heightened geoeconomic tensions, intractable conflict, debt unsustainability, and growing consumer price inflation provided a sobering backdrop for the meetings.

However, South Africa outlined a progressive agenda for its G20 presidency, grounded in solidarity, equality, and sustainability. The platform demonstrated limitless possibilities that could be unlocked through multilateral reimagination, reinvention, and reform.

The G20 provides an important mini-lateral framework seeking to foster international economic cooperation by addressing key issues. While participation matters, the G20’s Finance and Sherpa tracks advance policy options to break macroeconomic deadlocks and unlock socio-economic opportunities.

The Presidents of two of the world’s largest economies missed the Johannesburg rendezvous for very different reasons. While the US boycotted the first G20 summit in Africa, China’s Xi Jingping was represented by Premier Li Qiang.  Presidential and high-level representation from all other G20 countries, including from the African Union and European Union, demonstrated a shared commitment to global stability in the leaders’ declaration.

While the G20 has never been short of commitments, translating commitments into policy and implementation remains a fundamental challenge. Furthermore, the expanding G20 agenda has also drawn reasoned criticism. The lack of policy and implementation capacity within the G20 underlines three important opportunities for renewed multilateralism.

Opportunities for Renewed Multilateralism

Firstly, the multilateral system, which is currently under strain, remains the most viable institutional framework for operationalizing cooperation. While the UN Charter elicits no contestation, there is consensus about the need to reform the global security and financial institutions that originated post-World War II. While the G20 provides a useful space for policy dialogue, alignment, and calibration, the UNGA remains the primary forum for reforming the multilateral system.

Secondly, while there is a preoccupation with multilateral institutional legitimacy, efficiency, and credibility at regional and global levels, disagreement persists on the pathways to delivering a more effective, inclusive, and equitable international law-based global governance framework, or even whether inclusion and equity should accompany effectiveness as outcomes of global systemic reforms. Despite the growing competition, cooperation remains relevant for addressing transcendent global challenges, from conflict to climate change and pandemics.

Finally, while minilateral spaces offer space for cooperative ideation, they largely serve as building blocks for the kind of multilateral reform that incentivises international cooperation over competition. For most of Africa’s 55 AU member states, a reformed, functional and rules-based multilateral system provides tremendous opportunities to unlock their transformative potential.

Looking Ahead

South Africa’s G20 Presidency provided a progressive agenda in response to global uncertainty and volatility; the question remains how this agenda translates into policies that transform livelihoods by addressing the scourge of inequality worldwide.

 

Featured image: Photo by Den Harrson on Unsplash.