Response to “Towards Reconstitution of the G20”

Prof. Gala Díaz Langou | 14 May 2026

Dennis Snower's provocation does something rare in policy discourse: it brings genuine theoretical rigour to an institutional problem that most analysts treat as purely technical. The multilevel paradigm, the polycentric framing, the critique of communiqué diplomacy reflect a serious attempt to match the complexity of the moment with an equivalently complex analytical framework. This is especially relevant if we consider that the G20's crisis is not primarily organisational, but it is conceptual. Conceptual crises require conceptual tools.

I write in agreement with that diagnosis, and in the spirit of deepening it..

The legitimacy gap Snower doesn't name

The provocation identifies a crisis of global governance and proposes a reconstitution of the G20's architecture. What it does not fully interrogate is where legitimacy comes from, in the first place, and why, at this particular moment, it is draining away.

The UK's 2027 G20 Presidency arrives not merely amid geopolitical fragmentation, but amid a deeper sociological phenomenon: the progressive disaffiliation of populations from the institutions that claim to represent them. Disaffiliation (the weakening of the bonds between individuals, communities, and the social and political structures that were built to serve them) is not the same as polarisation, though it often produces it. It is something more structural: a loss of the sense that institutions are meaningfully responsive, that participation matters, that the rules of the game reflect one's interests or values.

This is not an abstract claim. As these words are written, the government that will chair the G20 in 2027 is facing an acute domestic legitimacy crisis (with significant losses in local elections and dozens of its own parliamentarians publicly calling for leadership change). That is not an argument against the UK presidency. It is an illustration of a broader pattern: across G20 member states, the governments doing the reconstituting are themselves operating under contested mandates. The institutional redesign Snower proposes would sit atop a foundation that is actively shifting.

This matters for the provocation's core argument. Flourishing Impact Statements, implementation dashboards, and joint Sherpa-Finance track reviews are valuable reforms. But they are procedural responses to a substantive problem. If the populations these governments represent no longer experience national political institutions as legitimate vehicles for their interests, then improving the coordination among those institutions (however intelligently, as reflected in the referred proposals) does not resolve the underlying deficit. It may even deepen it, by creating a more sophisticated architecture that is further removed from the people it ostensibly serves.

The nation-state as contested unit

Snower's framework assumes, reasonably enough, that nation-states remain the primary units of global governance. His proposed reforms (clearer participation tiers, polycentric coalitions, nested governance) are all organised around state actors as the sovereign principals, with subnational and civil society actors as consultative participants.

But this assumption deserves scrutiny. The same disaffiliation dynamic that is weakening the relationship between citizens and national governments is also strengthening alternative forms of political organisation and identity. Cities and subnational governments are, in many domains, governing more directly, more experimentally, and with greater popular legitimacy than national governments. Regional identities (civic, cultural, territorial) are asserting themselves with new force. Transnational communities of interest, organised around shared challenges rather than shared geography, are demanding and sometimes achieving forms of voice that bypass the nation-state entirely.

The G20's current engagement architecture (with all the working groups and, especially, the engagement groups) acknowledges this reality at the margins (for instance, through the C20 or U20). Snower's proposed reforms, including the new functional engagement platforms, would bring these actors closer to the process. But they remain, in his framing, participants in a state-led system. The question worth sitting with is whether that framing is stable over the time horizon the provocation implicitly addresses.

The question the provocation leaves open

If disaffiliation from nation-states is not a temporary crisis but a structural trajectory, if the political sociology of the coming decades continues to move toward more plural, more direct, more locally and transnationally organised forms of collective life, then what happens to a body whose entire constitutional architecture rests on state sovereignty as its organising principle?

This is not a rhetorical question, and I do not pose it to dismiss Snower's framework, which remains the most coherent available for the near-term challenge. I pose it because the UK presidency, if it is serious about reconstitution rather than renovation, should at minimum ask it. What would it mean for the G20 if the unit of political legitimacy continued to shift away from the nation-state, toward the city, the region, the transnational community, or even, in some futures, the individual citizen? What institutional architecture would be capable of remaining legitimate across that transition?

These are not questions with ready answers. But a forum that aspires to align global collective capacities with global collective challenges cannot indefinitely defer them. The deepest contribution of Snower's provocation is to establish that the G20 needs not renovation but reconstitution. The next question (reconstitution around what unit of democratic legitimacy) may be the one the UK presidency is uniquely positioned to begin asking.