6 GOVERNANCE
President Lula faces the challenge of addressing global institutional reform while ensuring tangible outcomes amid complex geopolitical tensions Brazil at the G20 summit: reform or delivery?
as a driving force behind the grouping of both India, Brazil and South Africa – IBSA – and the BRICS (the aforementioned plus Russia and China) was to lobby for reform, both with respect to the UN and international financial institutions. A key question is how prominently global institutional reform features in Brazil’s agenda for its 2024 G20 presidency. At the UN’s Summit of the Future in September 2024, President Lula stressed that the global governance crisis underscored the need for transformative change. THE LURE OF REFORM While the ambition is laudatory, a strong argument can be made that Brazil can (and should) devote this opportunity to focus on instrumental delivery rather than be lured by institutional reform. Unlike the UN, the G20 is already based on a culture of equality. As Celso Amorim, Lula’s chief foreign policy adviser, suggests, “the G20 is the closest thing to a representative body in the international community” despite a need for some adaptation. This also signals the significance of the G20 in demonstrating and promoting the importance of a multipolar world. That said, the record of using the G20 as a base for building progress on institutional reform has fallen short of ambitious expectations. To be sure, President Lula has acknowledged the difficulty of this process, recognising that the president of the World Bank should finally come from developing countries rather than the United States, and
Andrew F Cooper , Balsillie School of FĸƊäŲĸ°Ɗěńĸ°īƈü°ěŲŷ
B razil has long been a champion of global institutional reform. devoted to these efforts, Brazil’s record of achievement has been one of frustration. Brazil was denied a place in the United Nations Security Council at its creation. Subsequently, several Brazilian initiatives to provide greater equality – notably the push for UNSC reform, with India, Germany and Japan – have stalled. This persistence of long-standing frustration, intertwined with a recognition of new-found opportunity, informs Brazil’s 2024 G20 presidency. Brazil has notably benefited from the rise of informal institutions, as the G20 was elevated to the leaders’ level to circumvent blockages within the formal architecture of key international organisations. Indeed, from the perspective of Brazil’s President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, the G20 was required to deal with “broken paradigms and failing multilateral institutions”. Yet notwithstanding the diplomatic commitment and normative appeal Brazil deserves credit for the impact it has made on the G20. This was especially true of its role as chair of the G20 finance ministers and central bank governors in 2008, when the global financial crisis brought the G20 leaders’ forum into being. But frustrations about the institutional architecture have remained. One of Brazil’s original goals
130 G20 BRAZIL: THE RIO SUMMIT — 2024
globalgovernanceproject.org
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