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or a loosely associated grouping of like-minded countries Mexico, Indonesia, South Korea, Turkey and Australia (MIKTA), adaptability has become the proverbial gift that keeps on giving.

The “coordinatorship” that rotates annually between the countries has given the forum “added value” in a diplomatic sea of alphabet soup.

According to Mexican Deputy Foreign Minister Julián Ventura Valero, MIKTA’s development as a group has surpassed the expectations of its member states — owing mostly to it remaining a flexible and informal forum that allows countries to improve on the annual agenda and adapt it to the latest developments in geopolitics.

As one of the initiators of the platform, Mexico said that from the very beginning, member countries had agreed to keep the forum informal, allowing them to take turns raising the issues that concerned each country the most.

“We’ve been able to adapt very quickly to different issues in the agenda, [...] I think the value of MIKTA and its uniqueness among other processes is this ability to adapt and modify priorities as we go forward,” Valero told reporters during a tour organized for MIKTA delegates in Yogyakarta, on Thursday.

Being a relatively new forum, the idea for MIKTA was first conceived at an informal meeting on the sidelines of the G20 foreign minister’s meeting in Los Cabos, Mexico, in February 2012. A year later the group was officially formed with the hosting of the first MIKTA foreign ministers’ meeting on the margins of the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA) in New York.

Since then, the group has met three times a year: once at the UNGA, another time at the G20 Summit and once more in the country of the coordinator that year.

The group aims to support the strengthening of global governance and strive to find solutions by being a “guardian of the multilateralism framework”. As a forum of middle power countries, MIKTA wants to become a “bridge builder” and “consensus maker” between developing and developed countries.

“Despite being far apart in terms of geography and levels of development, we can gain from exchanging experiences by looking at [problems from] different perspectives,” Valero said.

As a result of this process, certain common concerns — such as natural-disaster prevention — made way for concrete cooperation.

MIKTA meetings and programs are coordinated alternately by the country coordinator for a period of one year, starting from Mexico, South Korea, Australia and Turkey. Indonesia was the last MIKTA coordinator in the first cycle ending last year.

Under its coordinatorship, Indonesia pushed a common agenda that focused on the creative economy and global peace, issues that were salient in the past year: the former was an overarching theme in ASEAN in 2018 and in the national debate on SMEs, while the latter was a major selling point during Indonesia’s bid for a seat on the UN Security Council.

This year, Mexico would focus on sustainable development, social welfare and development to reduce inequality, Valero said.

The group retains credibility through its result-oriented approach, he claimed, even though MIKTA’s effectiveness has been met by doubts over the lack of a clear direction that some critics pick up from their communiqués.

“I think it’s a legitimate concern that sometimes [with] this mechanism, people just meet and it’s [yet] another acronym,” Valero said, also explaining why the group could never become formal.

“Rigidity breeds sterility, so I think it’s important to be creative.” (tjs)