BARRON'S ECONOMY & POLICY The G20 Finally Becomes Something to Talk About COMMENTARY By Manjari Chatterjee Miller and Clare Harris Sept. 15, 2023 12:58 pm ET

 BARRON'S

ECONOMY & POLICY

The G20 Finally Becomes Something to Talk About

COMMENTARY

By Manjari Chatterjee Miller and Clare Harris

Sept. 15, 2023 12:58 pm ET

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Narendra Modi, India’s prime minister, greets members of the media during the closing of the Group of 20 Leaders Summit in New Delhi, India, on Sunday, Sept. 10, 2023.

Prakash Singh/Bloomberg

About the authors: Manjari Chatterjee Miller is a senior fellow for India, Pakistan, and South Asia at the Council on Foreign Relations, and associate professor of international relations at the Pardee School of Global Studies, Boston University. Clare Harris is a research associate for India, Pakistan, and South Asia at the Council on Foreign Relations.

Leaders from the world’s 19-largest economies and the European Union met last week for the Group of 20 Leaders’ Summit in New Delhi. India used the opportunity to turn what is usually a staid affair into a shiny coming out party, celebrating its G20 presidency and rising power status. The two-day summit was the culmination of a year-long national extravaganza, with over 200 meetings in 56 cities, and G20 education campaigns all topped with splashy posters of Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s face. The G20 yielded success for India in spades. But whether it yielded similar success for the forum as a whole is not so clear. 

India has long claimed to be a leading country in the Global South, but its relationships with the West have been fraught. Now, India is occupying the enviable position of being feted by Western leaders and counts the United States and France as two of its most important partners. This creates the opportunity for India to bridge the gap between the West and the Global South. 

India turned the G20 into the public forum that would display this new role, and it succeeded in three important ways. Having astutely asked Global South countries at an earlier forum what issues they wanted brought forward, India’s G20 agenda was devoted to furthering the interests of developing countries—climate financing, sustainable lending, multilateral bank reform, food security, and health and digital public infrastructure were all on the table. The forum was also marked by a transformation from the G20 to the G21, welcoming the African Union  as a new member. This was a significant win for India, which had championed the AU’s inclusion.

Despite the absence of Chinese President Xi Jinping and Russian President Vladimir Putin, and the lack of agreement about the Ukraine war, India managed to get the members to agree on a consensus statement. As there has never been a G20 Leaders’ Summit without a declaration, a lack of consensus would have been seen as a significant failure. Many experts said a consensus would be impossible for India to pull off, given the objections of countries such as France to weakening any language on the Ukraine crisis. While language on Ukraine was indeed softened, it did not omit the sentence from the previous Bali Declaration stating that the use of nuclear weapons in the war was inadmissible.

Finally, Prime Minister Modi, who is up for re-election next year, was able to showcase his status as the leader of a rising India—not only on the world stage, but for his domestic constituents as well. For example, G20 leaders and attendees were treated to booklets that displayed the word “Bharat” instead of India. Bharat is the word for India in many Indian languages, and its use addresses nationalist rhetoric from political parties such as Modi’s ruling BJP that claim the name “India” is “colonial.” This is a savvy display of Modi’s ability to grasp the political climate and turn it to his advantage, especially considering that 28 Indian opposition parties just came together to contest elections next year under the acronym “I.N.D.I.A.”

Historically, the G20 has been criticized for its inability to produce concrete outcomes. Whether this summit delivered any measurable wins for the members is debatable. In terms of addressing climate change, there was no commitment to phasing out fossil fuels such as coal. Leaders agreed to try to triple renewable energy capacity globally by 2030 and accepted the need to “phase-down” (rather than phase out) coal power. However, no timeline was set for this phase-down. Furthermore, leaders agreed that it would occur in accordance with national circumstances, giving leeway to nations that are more dependent on coal to continue using it. There were no hard targets set for supporting climate financing to assist developing countries. The only action taken was to extend the deadline of the pledge by developed countries to transfer $100 billion a year to developing countries from 2010 to 2025. There were also no landmark announcements like there were after the 2016 summit, when Presidents Obama and Xi announced the U.S. had agreed to join the Paris Climate Change Agreement.

Another major item on the agenda was multilateral development bank reform. Leaders agreed to strengthen and reform MDBs by including climate financing in their core missions, optimizing MDB balance sheets so that they can lend $200 billion more over the next ten years, and to try and address debt vulnerabilities of poorer countries. However, there is not yet any indication as to how member countries intend to meet these goals.

One potentially important development came through the bilateral and minilateral meetings on the sidelines of the summit. The governments of India, the U.S., Germany, Italy, France, the EU, the United Arab Emirates, and Saudi Arabia committed to establishing an India-Middle East-Europe Economic Corridor: a ship-to-rail transit network that will connect India to the EU, create jobs, increase trade, strengthen supply chains, boost connectivity, and bolster commerce and food security. But concrete details on the plan were thin on the ground, not to mention the fact that India has in the past committed to several such connectivity corridors—BIMSTEC comes to mind—and come up short.  

Some have argued that it is not the forum itself that is important, but its convening ability—that is, the meetings on the fringes of the summit deliver more wins than the G20 itself. This claim challenges the value of persisting with an old institution if similar results could be achieved bilaterally or minilaterally. Regardless, this year the G20 became, perhaps for the first time, an event that many people—not simply policy wonks and academics—were talking about. For that, both the Indian government and Prime Minister Modi deserve credit.

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