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G20: Turning a talking shop into a parade of actions
The G20 forum could be a legitimate channel for capital formulation, and yet it should also serve our global humanitarian objectives.
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The G20 Sherpas on day one of the first Sherpa Meeting on Dec. 7, 2021. Attendants included Mari Elka Pangestu, managing director of Development Policy and Partnerships at the World Bank.
Indonesia officially assumed the Group of 20 presidency from Italy at the G20 Summit late in October last year. Domestic and overseas support bring along hopes for Indonesia to lead the forum toward collaborative solutions to counter global challenges, with recovering from the pandemic as a priority.
History shows that G20 has proven successful in constructing solutions that later become references for global policies, such as those to overcome the financial crisis in 2008. However, it remains a challenging task for us, as we understand that the nature of G20 is an informal dialogue with flexible consensus working on a voluntary basis. This means that every action taken by G20 members will solely be based on a collective understanding of shared ideas, with no enforcement to bind the members.
Intensive dialogues and harmonious synergies between developed and developing countries in the G20 have seemed to promise a brighter future for global governance. The informality of the forum may enrich the current spectrum that has been dominated by a regime-based diplomacy for many years.
However, this form of diplomacy allows elasticity. Non-binding decisions and lack of deliverables monitoring have hindered meaningful impact from its declaration and grandious communiqués, thus reflecting G20 as a mere norm-setter forum.
Entering the third year of the pandemic, the world is still waiting for a breakthrough solution from the G20 forum. In a crisis like no other, COVID-19 has brought the world from a health crisis to economic doldrums. The huge impact of the COVID-19 crisis on many social, health and economic aspects is not easy to recover from, thus requiring more actions rather than just dialogue from the G20 to prompt global recovery.
Indonesia’s presidency will be our opportunity to shift this G20 approach from (a mere) talking shop to a parade of actions. Indeed, this transformation shall consider various common interests, network interdependence and mutual benefits.
Indonesia shall capitalize on the G20 legitimacy as the premiere global economic cooperation forum to invite other members to construct a set of policy actions in the spirit of mutual understanding and global collaboration. The G20 forum could be a legitimate channel for capital formulation, and yet it should also serve our global humanitarian objectives.
