The G20 summit in Johannesburg this weekend was supposed to demonstrate the growing influence of the Global South in international economic governance. It was the first G20 leaders’ summit held on African soil, hosted by South Africa under the theme of “Solidarity, Equality, Sustainability”, with debt sustainability, climate finance, development and reform of global institutions high on the agenda. Instead, the summit also demonstrated how fragmented the organisation has become. Donald Trump did not attend and the United States boycotted the leaders’ meeting, following an increasingly bitter dispute with South Africa’s government, while Argentina also distanced itself from parts of the summit declaration. Despite American opposition, the remaining members adopted a declaration addressing issues including climate change, debt burdens and development financing. The disagreement is easy to interpret as another Trump-versus-multilateralism confrontation, but the more significant development is structural: institutions such as the G20 were created when Western economic leadership was much easier to assume; they now operate in a world where emerging economies possess enough weight to demand greater influence but not enough shared interests to form a coherent alternative leadership bloc.
South Africa deliberately used its presidency to emphasise problems disproportionately affecting developing economies. Many poorer countries borrow internationally at much higher interest rates than advanced economies, face greater vulnerability to climate shocks despite contributing relatively little to historical emissions and possess limited influence over institutions such as the International Monetary Fund and World Bank relative to their growing populations. African countries collectively contain more than 1.5 billion people but have historically held far less agenda-setting power in global economic institutions than Europe or North America. Hosting the G20 in Johannesburg therefore carries genuine symbolic importance, but symbolism alone does not change bargaining power. Developing countries gain greater influence when their economic scale, financial resources and institutional coordination increase enough that major powers need their cooperation to solve international problems.
Debt illustrates why reform is difficult. Developing economies frequently borrow at higher rates partly because investors perceive greater currency, political and default risk. Governments understandably argue that this creates a development trap: countries needing infrastructure most face the highest cost of financing it, which slows growth and makes debt harder to repay. But simply demanding cheaper lending cannot eliminate the risk investors are pricing. A sustainable solution requires both external reform and domestic institutional improvement. Multilateral development banks can provide guarantees and longer-term finance, while governments need stronger tax systems, transparent borrowing and projects capable of producing enough economic return to justify the debt. Cheap finance invested badly merely postpones the fiscal problem.
Climate finance produces an even stronger distributional argument. African countries contributed only a small share of cumulative global greenhouse-gas emissions but are highly exposed to drought, heat, flooding and agricultural disruption. There is therefore a credible equity case that wealthier states responsible for much larger historical emissions should finance part of adaptation in poorer countries. Yet climate negotiations repeatedly struggle over who pays, how much and through which institutions. Wealthy governments face domestic voters asking why taxes should finance infrastructure abroad, while developing governments argue that they are being asked to bear costs created largely during other countries’ industrialisation. The disagreement is not principally about whether climate damage exists. It is about distributing the bill across countries and generations.
Trump’s absence reflects a substantially different American philosophy. His administration is sceptical of climate commitments it believes constrain American economic activity, hostile towards several multilateral arrangements and increasingly willing to use bilateral economic leverage instead. The dispute with South Africa has also expanded around domestic South African land policy and Trump’s allegations concerning the treatment of white Afrikaners, claims strongly rejected by the South African government. Whatever the merits of the broader political dispute, boycotting the summit reduces American influence over the document and negotiations occurring inside it. Leaving a room can demonstrate disapproval, but it also means other governments write more of the rules while you are outside.
This is the recurring trade-off in Trump’s multilateral strategy. The United States possesses enough market, military and financial power to negotiate bilaterally from a position of strength. A smaller country negotiating individually with Washington usually has fewer outside options. Multilateral institutions partially reduce that asymmetry by allowing countries to coordinate. Trump therefore often prefers bilateral bargaining because American power converts more efficiently into concessions there. Other countries rationally prefer institutions precisely because institutions increase their collective leverage. The disagreement over multilateralism is consequently not merely ideological. Institutional preferences reflect power.
China benefits from this whenever Washington withdraws from international forums. Beijing can present itself as a defender of developing-country representation and multilateral cooperation while expanding trade, infrastructure finance and political relationships across Africa. But China’s claim to Global South leadership contains contradictions of its own. China is simultaneously a developing-country advocate, the world’s second-largest economy, an enormous creditor and a manufacturing superpower whose exports compete directly with industries in other developing economies. African governments can welcome Chinese infrastructure while worrying about debt, local employment or dependence on commodity exports. The Global South therefore is not a unified political actor waiting for China to lead it.
India demonstrates the same diversity particularly clearly. India supports greater representation for developing countries and used its own 2023 G20 presidency to secure permanent membership for the African Union, an important institutional change. Yet India also competes with China, maintains close relations with the United States, imports Russian energy and possesses different interests from commodity exporters or heavily indebted African states. Brazil, Saudi Arabia, Indonesia and South Africa each have similarly distinct priorities. The term “Global South” therefore describes a useful distributional perspective but not a coherent geopolitical bloc. Shared dissatisfaction with the existing order does not automatically produce agreement about the replacement.
This is why reform of institutions such as the IMF, World Bank and UN Security Council moves so slowly. Existing powers benefit from the current allocation of influence and therefore have limited incentives to surrender it. Emerging powers agree that representation should change but disagree about who should gain the additional authority. India wants a permanent Security Council seat. Pakistan would view greater Indian power differently. African states agree that Africa is underrepresented but still need to determine how representation should be allocated across more than fifty countries. Institutional reform therefore faces both an incumbent-resistance problem and a challenger-coordination problem.
South Africa’s G20 presidency is nevertheless significant because agenda-setting itself has value. Issues such as sovereign debt, development finance and the cost of capital receive greater attention when developing economies chair major institutions. The same occurred during India’s presidency, when digital public infrastructure and Global South representation became more prominent. International institutions do not redistribute power instantly, but repeated agenda-setting can gradually change which problems major governments consider normal subjects of global coordination.
The G20 itself remains valuable precisely because its members disagree. It contains the United States, China, Russia, India, the European Union, Japan, major emerging economies and now the African Union. A forum containing only like-minded states can produce stronger declarations but has less value for managing conflicts between rival powers. The usefulness of the G20 should therefore not be measured by how harmonious its communiqués sound. Its function is creating a place where governments representing most of the global economy continue communicating despite disagreements elsewhere.
The risk is that consensus requirements gradually make declarations so broad that they produce little action. Climate language is negotiated. Debt principles are endorsed. Development goals are repeated. Implementation then depends on national governments and financial institutions whose incentives have not changed. This creates multilateralism’s implementation gap: international summits can identify collective problems much more easily than they can compel individual governments to bear the costs of solving them.
The solution is not necessarily stronger supranational authority. It is designing agreements where national incentives align more closely with collective outcomes. Climate finance can be structured around projects with measurable returns. Debt restructuring can occur earlier before crises destroy more value. Development banks can use guarantees to mobilise private capital rather than attempting to finance everything directly. Wealthier states can receive commercial opportunities through infrastructure investment rather than treating development spending entirely as aid. Cooperation becomes more durable when countries can explain domestically what they receive from it.
Africa’s growing importance will make these questions harder to ignore. The continent’s population is projected to expand enormously over the coming decades, while its urbanisation, mineral resources and energy needs will shape global growth. Africa contains resources critical to batteries, renewable energy and advanced technologies, but exporting raw minerals alone will not guarantee development. The central economic challenge is converting demographic and natural-resource potential into productive capacity through electricity, education, infrastructure and institutions.
This is why the Johannesburg summit matters more than the diplomatic dispute surrounding Trump’s absence. The international economic order is being renegotiated because the distribution of population and economic power has changed. The United States and Europe remain extraordinarily influential, China has become indispensable, India is rising, and African states increasingly want institutional influence proportional to their future importance. No single coalition possesses enough power to redesign the system alone.
The emerging order therefore is unlikely to be simply Western or Chinese. It will be negotiated repeatedly among overlapping groups of states whose interests align on one issue and diverge on another. That makes global governance slower and messier, but it also reflects the actual distribution of power more accurately than the world of 1945.
Johannesburg has exposed the central problem clearly: the old international order is no longer representative enough to remain politically unquestioned, while the states demanding a new order remain too diverse to agree easily on what should replace it. The future of institutions such as the G20 will depend on whether they can manage that disagreement without requiring either American dominance or anti-American unity to function.
