Towards Reconstitution of the G20
Prof. Dennis J. Snower | 10 April 2026
The UK’s 2027 G20 Presidency arrives at a constitutional moment for global governance. The UK has formally confirmed that it will host the G20 in 2027, and official UK statements in early 2026 indicate that initial plans are already being discussed with major partners. That matters because the G20 itself was elevated to leaders’ level in the 2008 financial crisis; in other words, it was born as an adaptive response to systemic breakdown, not as a fixed constitutional order. Today, with transactional great-power politics, renewed tariff coercion, and open strain on alliance commitments, the G20 faces another such moment of refounding (UK Government, 2025; Reuters, 2026a,b)..
Underlying Principles
The right response is not to lament the weakening of a universal rule-based order, nor to surrender to pure power politics. It is to redesign institutions so that cooperation becomes more robust under conditions of heterogeneity, mistrust, and repeated interaction.
In that light, the G20 should be reconstituted not as a mini-UN pretending to produce universal rules, but as a polycentric platform for structured cooperation among overlapping coalitions. That is the core opportunity. Collective-action problems, especially under complexity and scale, are often better addressed through polycentric systems that permit action at multiple levels, experimentation, learning, and mutual adjustment, rather than by waiting for a single comprehensive global bargain.
Because the weakening of the old order creates room for institutional innovation. When universal agreement is no longer credible, many observers assume the only alternative is fragmentation. There is another way: structured pluralism. A polycentric G20 could become the place where coalitions are incubated, monitored, connected, and scaled. It would not replace the UN, WTO, IMF, WHO, FSB, or regional bodies. It would sit above and among them as a strategic meta-governor: aligning agendas, reducing transaction costs among coalitions, diffusing successful institutional designs, and preventing fragmentation from hardening into disorder.
The opportunity is also political. A reconstituted G20 could restore legitimacy precisely by abandoning the illusion that legitimacy comes only from universal uniformity. In a more heterogeneous world, legitimacy comes from three things: voice in rule-making, differentiation in implementation, and visible delivery.
So the UK’s presidency should aim not merely to chair the G20, but to refound it around five constitutional propositions: the G20 as a polycentric coordinator rather than a proto-world-government; coalition-based cooperation rather than lowest-common-denominator consensus; monitored delivery rather than communiqué inflation; nested multilevel governance rather than state-only bargaining; and flourishing-oriented problem solving rather than narrow macroeconomic managerialism. If done well, the UK would not simply preserve the G20 through a period of geopolitical stress. It would help redesign global governance for a world in which cooperation must be more adaptive, more plural, and more institutionally intelligent than the order now passing away.
Towards Implementation
The most important institutional implication of the previous argument is that the G20 should stop operating mainly as an annual summit with a rotating agenda and instead become a polycentric steering system: a forum that organizes cooperation across multiple levels, domains, and coalitions, with clearer division of labor, stronger continuity, and more explicit orientation toward human flourishing.
At present, the G20 still works through a relatively thin institutional form: it has no charter and no permanent secretariat; the presidency rotates annually; the Troika provides some continuity; and the process is divided between a Finance Track and a Sherpa Track, each supported by working groups and international organizations. That light structure has been useful for flexibility, but it is too weak for a world of sustained geopolitical conflict, economic fragmentation, climate stress, AI disruption, and recurring health and debt shocks. The UK’s 2027 presidency therefore creates an opportunity not merely to host the G20, but to redesign how it functions (UK Government, 2025).
Proposed Reforms
The first reform should be from presidency-driven improvisation to structured continuity. Because the G20 has no permanent secretariat and each presidency can substantially reshape priorities and workstreams, institutional memory is fragile. India in 2023 worked through 13 Sherpa Track working groups and 8 Finance Track workstreams; Brazil in 2024 described 15 Sherpa Track working groups and 9 technical groups in the Finance Track; South Africa in 2025 then conducted a formal review of Finance Track operating and decision-making processes and considered proposals for a periodic review every five years and for an institutional repository. That trajectory already points toward the right solution: the UK should propose a light permanent support architecture consisting of a digital institutional repository, a small continuity unit attached to the Troika, and a mandatory five-year review of working methods. This would respect the G20’s informal character while implementing principles of monitoring, nested enterprises, and low-cost conflict resolution.
The second reform should be clearer boundaries and differentiated participation. This is not about exclusion for its own sake; it is about clarity over who is responsible for what. The G20 should therefore distinguish four layers of participation: core members; formal invited institutions; issue-specific coalition partners; and social/epistemic stakeholders. At present, non-members and international organizations participate, but the roles are often fluid and presidency-dependent. A reconstituted G20 should define standing criteria for guest participation, coalition participation, and expert participation. For example, the African Union, regional development banks, the IMF, World Bank, OECD, WTO, WHO, ILO, FSB, and selected technical standard setters should have more predictable roles in relevant workstreams. That would make the G20 more intelligible and more governable, aligned with the multilevel paradigm’s emphasis on functional organization and distributed agency.
The third reform should be from communiqué diplomacy to monitored implementation. The G20 obviously cannot sanction members the way a state sanctions local rule-breakers, but it can create escalating reputational and procedural consequences: scorecards, public implementation dashboards, peer-review sessions, loss of convening privileges in specific coalitions, and delayed advancement of country-sponsored initiatives. At present, the OECD already provides analytical support, monitoring, and policy inputs across both tracks, and earlier G20 accountability reports already emphasized coordination across tracks. The UK should formalize this into a standing G20 Implementation and Learning Mechanism, with annual public progress reports and biennial peer review on major deliverables (OECD, 2026).
The fourth reform should be from siloed workstreams to nested tasking. The multilevel paradigm argues that the economy is embedded in social, political, and natural systems, and that decision-making must respond to interdependence under uncertainty. The G20 should therefore require all major workstreams to specify: the problem they are solving; the level at which the problem must be governed; the adjacent workstreams they depend on; and the flourishing dimensions they affect. This would change G20 practice from parallel discussions to explicitly linked problem-solving.
Human Flourishing as Central Goal of G20 Policy-Making
Human flourishing should become central by changing what the G20 treats as success. At present, the Finance Track still defines its core task mainly in terms of macroeconomic stability and growth, though even recent Finance Track documents have expanded discussion toward inequality, climate, social outcomes, and inclusive growth. Brazil’s Framework Working Group, for example, explicitly addressed growth, inequality, social outcomes, and the macroeconomic effects of climate change. That is already a partial move away from narrow GDP managerialism (Government of Brazil, 2024).
The multilevel paradigm provides a more coherent goal structure. Human flourishing is not reducible to utility or income alone; it depends on multiple drivers, including solidarity, agency, material gain, and environmental sustainability. In G20 terms, that means policy assessment should be organized around four questions:
Does a policy strengthen people’s material security and productive opportunity?
Does it increase individual and collective agency?
Does it reinforce social trust, belonging, and resilience?
Does it preserve ecological conditions for long-run wellbeing?
The practical implication is that each major G20 initiative should carry a Flourishing Impact Statement. That statement would not replace conventional macroeconomic analysis; it would sit alongside it. For instance, debt restructuring proposals would be evaluated not only for market confidence and fiscal sustainability, but also for effects on employment, social cohesion, health capacity, and environmental investment. AI and digital initiatives would be assessed not only for productivity, but also for agency, inclusion, child protection, cognitive autonomy, and institutional trust. Energy-transition policies would be assessed not only for emissions and capital mobilization, but also for regional livelihoods, affordability, and political legitimacy.
Institutionally, the G20 could embed flourishing in three ways. First, it should adopt a headline dashboard that complements GDP with a small set of shared indicators. Second, all working groups should report annually against those indicators in their domain. Third, Finance Ministers and Sherpas should be required to review a consolidated flourishing report before the Leaders’ Summit. This would make flourishing not a rhetorical add-on, but a procedural requirement.
Rethinking the Structure of G20 Decision-Making
Future G20 decision-making should be structured around three levels.
Three Tiers of Problem-Solving
The first level is strategic direction by Leaders. Leaders should set a small number of cross-cutting priorities for a three-year presidential cycle, not merely for one year. The Troika should become a genuine three-year steering mechanism rather than a loose continuity device. The UK presidency should propose that each presidential cycle adopt perhaps three or four priorities, such as: resilient and inclusive global growth; secure digital and AI governance; climate-energy transition with just distribution; and social resilience against hunger, poverty, and health shocks. That would bring the G20 closer to priority-oriented governance while preserving flexibility. The Troika model already exists; the reform is to give it more substantive planning content (G20 Brazil, 2024).
The second level is integrated ministerial steering. Instead of treating ministerial meetings as separate ladders to the summit, the G20 should organize them into clusters with clear joint outputs. One useful structure would be:
macro-financial cluster: finance ministers, central bank governors, tax, infrastructure, debt, MDB reform;
human development cluster: health, education, employment, social inclusion, hunger and poverty;
productive systems cluster: trade, digital economy, industry, energy transitions, innovation;
resilience cluster: climate, disaster risk reduction, food systems, supply chains, anti-corruption.
Each cluster would produce a single integrated annual report rather than multiple disconnected communiqués.
The third level is problem-solving working architecture. Working groups should not merely discuss themes; they should be assigned specific collective-action problems, timelines, monitoring indicators, and escalation routes. Decision-making would then become iterative: expert workstream → cluster review → joint Sherpa/Finance Deputies review → ministerial resolution → leaders’ endorsement.
Working Groups
The present working-group model is too fragmented and too variable across presidencies. India’s presidency explicitly listed Sherpa Track groups such as Agriculture, Anti-Corruption, Culture, Digital Economy, Disaster Risk Reduction, Development, Education, Employment, Environment and Climate Sustainability, Energy Transitions, Health, Trade and Investment, and Tourism; Brazil’s FAQ lists 15 Sherpa groups and 9 Finance technical groups, including Finance and Health, International Taxation, Sustainable Finance, Infrastructure, Financial Inclusion, and others. That breadth is useful, but it needs stronger architecture.
A future G20 should have three types of working groups.
First, standing functional Working Groups. These should remain relatively stable across presidencies. They would include:
Macroeconomic Coordination and Inequality
International Financial Architecture and Debt
Sustainable Finance and MDB Reform
Trade, Industrial Policy, and Supply-Chain Resilience
Digital Economy, Data Governance, and AI
Health and Biosecurity
Food Systems and Agriculture
Energy Security and Just Transition
Climate, Nature, and Resilience
Employment, Skills, and Social Protection
Anti-Corruption and Public Integrity
These would replace some current fragmentation and give the G20 a more legible operating core.
Second, cross-track Joint Task Forces. Brazil already used cross-track mechanisms such as the Joint Finance and Health Task Force and task forces on hunger and climate mobilization; South Africa’s 2025 Finance Track summary also refers to continued discussion of future arrangements for finance-health coordination. The UK should generalize this model. There should be permanent joint task forces on:
Finance–Health
Finance–Climate–Energy
Digital–Trade–Competition
Food–Climate–Development
Debt–Development–MDB Reform
These joint task forces would be where embedded-economy thinking becomes operational.
Third, time-limited Priority Groups. These would be created for a presidential cycle to solve particular high-priority problems: for example, sovereign debt workouts, AI safety interoperability, critical-minerals governance, clean-grid finance, or antimicrobial resistance. Their mandate would expire unless renewed. This would preserve adaptability under uncertainty.
Engagement Groups
The G20 already has Engagement Groups composed of non-government participants. India listed B20, C20, L20, P20, S20, SAI20, Startup20, T20, U20, W20, and Y20. Brazil went further by explicitly organizing recommendations from Engagement Groups into both Sherpa and Finance Tracks, and by experimenting with direct interaction between the Finance Track and the “Social G20.” That is a highly significant precedent (G20 India, 2023).
The future system should distinguish between representative and functional Engagement Groups.
Representative groups would continue to represent major constituencies: business, labor, civil society, science, youth, women, cities, supreme audit institutions, think tanks, startups, and so forth.
Functional groups should be added where the governance problem requires specific expertise not well captured by the traditional list. Under current conditions, the UK should propose four new functional engagement platforms:
A20: AI, algorithmic accountability, and digital agency;
N20: nature, biodiversity, land, and food-system resilience;
H20+: an expanded health-security and social protection forum linked to Finance;
R20: regional and city-level resilience, connecting U20 more directly to climate, health, and migration pressures.
These groups should not operate as parallel advocacy lanes sending last-minute recommendations. They should be procedurally tied into working groups. Each working group should have an associated engagement forum, a formal hearing calendar, and a written-response obligation from officials. Brazil’s 2024 experiment of bringing Finance Track officials and social actors together shows this is feasible and can strengthen transparency, legitimacy, and representativeness.
The groups should also work together through a Joint Engagement Forum held twice yearly. One session would feed into working-group agendas early in the cycle; the other would review draft outputs before ministerial meetings. T20 and S20 should play especially strong epistemic roles, helping translate cognidiversity into structured policy alternatives rather than diffuse pluralism.
The Finance Track and the Sherpa Track
The Finance Track should remain indispensable, but it should no longer act as though macroeconomic and financial questions can be separated from social, ecological, technological, and political conditions. Even recent official G20 materials reflect this drift toward embeddedness: Brazil’s Framework Working Group addressed inequality and climate, and OECD support across G20 presidencies has spanned resilient and inclusive growth, AI, critical minerals, women’s and youth employment, and development outcomes.
So the future Finance Track should become the G20’s strategic capacity-and-allocation track. Its distinctive role should be to answer five questions:
What are the macroeconomic risks?
Where is financing blocked?
Which institutions need reform?
How should public and private capital be mobilized?
What are the distributional and resilience effects?
That implies a Finance Track centered on macro coordination, debt, MDB reform, taxation, inclusion, infrastructure, sustainable finance, and cross-border financial stability, but with mandatory links to human, digital, and environmental outcomes.
The Sherpa Track should become the G20’s system-integration track. Its task would not just be to oversee “everything else,” but to integrate the political, social, developmental, technological, and ecological work needed to make macro-financial decisions legitimate and effective. Sherpas should therefore have stronger agenda-setting authority for cross-track synthesis and stronger responsibility for resolving conflicts among workstreams.
In short, the Finance Track should specialize in means mobilization, while the Sherpa Track specializes in goal integration and political coherence. That division fits the multilevel paradigm very well: one track works mainly on capabilities and constraints; the other on purposes, coordination, and embeddedness.
The central institutional reform is that the two tracks should no longer meet mainly in parallel. They should work through a regularized joint operating system.
That operating system should include:
A shared annual strategy note. At the start of each presidency, Sherpas and Finance Deputies should issue a joint note defining the year’s priorities, cross-track dependencies, and expected outputs.
Mandatory joint reviews. Any workstream affecting at least two flourishing dimensions or spanning more than one domain should undergo joint Sherpa–Finance Deputies review before ministerial sign-off.
Permanent cross-track task forces. Finance–Health already exists as a model, and climate mobilization and hunger-poverty initiatives under Brazil show the feasibility of cross-track design. These should become normal rather than exceptional.
Integrated outcome documents. Instead of allowing separate technical silos to produce disconnected documents, major issue areas should culminate in a single integrated paper with financial, social, environmental, and institutional analysis.
A common implementation dashboard. This would allow Leaders, ministers, officials, engagement groups, and the public to see where commitments stand.
A joint secretariat function within the Troika. Not a heavy treaty secretariat, but a continuity mechanism for agenda management, document archiving, cross-track coordination, and implementation follow-up.
If the UK presidency institutionalized even half of these reforms, the G20 would begin to operate less like an annual diplomatic fair and more like an adaptive system of multilevel governance.
Conclusion
The deepest change required is conceptual. The G20 should no longer understand itself merely as the premier forum for international economic cooperation in the narrow sense. It should understand itself as the premier forum for aligning global collective capacities with global collective challenges. Durable cooperation depends on clear roles, context-sensitive rules, participation in rule-making, monitoring, graduated consequences, low-cost dispute handling, nested governance, and the ability to organize action at multiple levels under uncertainty.
For the UK presidency, the opportunity is therefore unusually large: not simply to broker another communiqué, but to redesign the G20 so that human flourishing becomes the organizing purpose, the two tracks become genuinely integrated, the working groups become problem-solving units, and the engagement groups become constitutive parts of governance rather than peripheral petitioners.
References
G20 Brazil. 2024. “About the G20 FAQ.” URL: https://www.gov.br/g20/en/about-the-g20/faq
G20 India. 2023. “Engagement groups.” URL: https://www.g20.in/en/workstreams/engagement-groups.html
OECD. 2026. “The OECD and G20.” URL: https://www.oecd.org/en/about/oecd-and-g20.html
Reuters. 2026a. “Trump Threatens NATO Exit, Scaling Up Tensions with Allies.” 1 April 2026. URL: https://www.reuters.com/business/aerospace-defense/trump-threatens-nato-exit-scaling-up-tensions-with-allies-2026-04-01/
Reuters. 2026b. “US Supreme Court Strikes Down Trump’s Global Tariffs.” 20 February 2026. URL: https://www.reuters.com/legal/government/us-supreme-court-rejects-trumps-global-tariffs-2026-02-20/
UK Government. 2025. “Growth and Opportunity Set to Be at the Heart of UK-Hosted G20.” 22 November 2025. URL: https://www.gov.uk/government/news/growth-and-opportunity-set-to-be-at-the-heart-of-uk-hosted-g20