The Rise and Fall of the G20: What is the point of this Carnival in Rio?

If the G20 did not exist in 2024, would we invent it? Would it need inventing, and could it even be done? All international institutions are constrained by path dependencies as they evolve – sometimes to the detriment of their evolution – and the G20 is no different. As a body established in the wake of the global financial crisis to oversee the recovery and bring together the ‘rising powers’ with the core G7 states, this strange entity has, almost two decades later, still struggled to define a clear role for itself.

Is it a club, a steering committee, a forum, or a conventional international organisation? It has had the potential to be each of these things at different points, without ever fully consolidating as one of them. Perhaps this amorphousness is a strength. But it is more plausibly a weakness, because the G20 faces a potential legitimacy crisis in a world where questions of sustained economic stagnation, geopolitical upheaval and accelerating climate change are inescapable. Consequently, the tensions it embodies – occasionality vs permanence, representativeness vs exclusivity, narrowness vs width, steering vs governing – have become even sharper and in need of resolution.

Watch the introduction video and download the full brief below.