With a population of 212 million (the world’s seventh largest) and an area measuring 8.5 million km² (the world’s fifth largest), Brazil carries significant geopolitical weight in world affairs. Although the Indo-Pacific vision tends to ignore it, India has much less reason to do so, given the extensive links that have been forged with Brazil, especially in the present century. India works closely with Brazil at the Conference of the Parties (COP) on climate policy and action, and the expanded Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa (BRICS) group of nations, with both institutions chaired by Brazil in 2025.[1] More importantly, Brazil succeeded India as President of the Group of Twenty (G20) and held this presidency from November 2023 to October 2024. Above all, the two nations enjoy cordial, cooperative and ever-growing bilateral relations.
The G20 connection is of special significance. The exceptional coincidence of four developing countries serving as presidents in consecutive order gave a rare opportunity to the Global South to fashion the G20 according to its perspectives without ignoring the reasonable needs of the other side. The process began with Indonesia as President (2021–22), continued with India (2022–23) followed by Brazil (2023–24), and then culminated in South Africa taking on the mantle till October 2025. This will complete the first cycle of the G20 presidency. and there lies a tale. The U.S. is set to be the next President, but the new administration, Trump 2.0, seems to have considerable scepticism about the G20, so much so that the U.S. Secretary of State, Marco Rubio, decided not to attend the G20 foreign ministers meeting in Johannesburg in February 2025. Appraising the G20 in general and Brazil’s presidency in particular needs to be undertaken realistically by considering the immediate future prospects of this important plurilateral grouping, a significant creation of the 21st century. This article outlines Brazil’s priorities and approach as the President of the G20, analyses the struggles and achievements of its presidency and offers a balanced assessment of Brazil’s G20 leadership. It also outlines the challenges faced by the G20 in the near future and concludes with a reference to the prospects of multilateralism and plurilateralism in world affairs in the next few years.
Brazil’s Approach
President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva explained the philosophical basis of Brazil’s G20 presidency in his speech delivered at the closing session of the G20 New Delhi summit on 10 September 2023.[2] He recalled that the G20 was created 15 years ago as ‘one of the world’s main global governance bodies’ after the global financial crisis . The joint action enabled the world to face ‘the most crucial moments, but it was insufficient to correct the structural flaws of neoliberalism’. Driven by his leftist-realist convictions, Lula listed the current challenges: concentration of wealth, hunger, sustainable development under threat, and a set of outdated governance institutions, adding, ‘We will only be able to tackle all these problems if we address inequality’. President Lula listed Brazil’s G20 priorities as:
(i) Social inclusion and the fight against hunger.
(ii) Energy transition and sustainable development in its three aspects—social, economic and environmental.
(iii) Reform of global governance institutions.
They were all reflected in Brazil’s G20 presidency motto, ‘Building the world and a sustainable planet’. President Lula congratulated Prime Minister Narendra Modi for ‘the effective management’ of the G20 presidency, with his senior officials reiterating at various fora that Brazil would continue India’s work, while seeking to leave its own imprint on the G20. In an interview, Kenneth Felix Haczynski Da Nobrega, Ambassador of the Federative Republic of Brazil in Delhi, stated: ‘The Brazilian presidency will also try to connect the big global challenges to the domestic issues. In this regard, we’re going to follow the Indian example’.[3]
Finally, Lula added a note of personal appreciation and gratitude for Mahatma Gandhi, who, he said, ‘has great meaning in my political life because the fight for nonviolence is an example that I followed for many decades when I was in the trade union movement’ (Government of Brazil, 2023).[4]
Principal Achievements
All G20 summits follow a similar pattern of working methods and preparations. Initial discussions at the officials’ level result in ministerial meetings that produce detailed joint statements. They, thus, create the basis for deliberations and their outcomes at the level of the summit leaders. All the pre-summit dialogues run at the financial or the sherpa track. Separately, a variety of engagement groups, which bring together the stakeholders outside the government domain, hold their meetings and produce outcomes and documents that are considered by those working at official and ministerial forums. In short, the summit declarations are treated as the ultimate essence of the consensus reached by the G20 family after a year of in-depth work by all relevant parties.
As the host and the president, Brazil did remarkably well in taking a cue from its two predecessors—Indonesia and India. Its main worry was, however, attributed to two countries: Argentina, where a newly installed rightist government expressed reservations about several elements of G20 work; and the U.S., where a new leader, Donald Trump, was in the process of emerging, armed with his own deep scepticism about multilateralism in general and the G20 agenda in particular.
In this broad context, looking at three aspects of the Brazilian presidency may be worthwhile to appreciate what it achieved after a year of toil.
The G20 Social Declaration
The G20 Social Summit, held from 14–16 November 2024 in Rio de Janeiro, represented social movements and civil society organisations from Brazil and worldwide. It was based on a well-designed participatory process that reflects the demands and proposals made by organisations representing women, people of colour, indigenous people, traditional communities, people living with disabilities, and others. The declaration of this summit has three key pillars: combatting hunger and socio-economic injustice, sustainability and tackling climate change, and global governance reform and strengthening democracy. To fund the required changes the declaration advocates the progressive taxation of the super-rich and the allocation of funds through transparent mechanisms under the supervision of civil society. The document presented to the G20 leaders appealed to them. Civil society representative Mazé Morais said, ‘It is time for us to take on the responsibility of leading a profound and lasting transformation’.[5]
Marcio Macedo, a minister in the presidency, expressed his appreciation for putting social movements at the centre of the global dialogue, adding, ‘Only a president with Lula’s characteristics is capable of making social movements and the people central to the global agenda’ .
Global Alliance Against Hunger and Poverty
The formal launch of this alliance at the opening ceremony of the Rio G20 summit on 18 November 2024 was a key achievement of the Brazilian presidency. The alliance has been joined by 98 countries, 28 international organisations, 11 international financial institutions, and 51 philanthropic foundations and nongovernment organisations, as on 27 may 2025.3 While lauding the alliance, President Lula pointed to the Food and agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) data showing that 733 million people were undernourished in 2024. He argued that hunger was completely unacceptable in a world where 400 million tons of food were produced yearly, in addition to military spending amounting to U.S.$2.4 trillion. The alliance plans to eradicate hunger by 2030 as a commitment to Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). It ‘supports country-driven, evidence-based programmes by enhancing international cooperation and promoting knowledge exchange’.[6] The emphatic language of the document and the fanfare with which the alliance was launched created a new level of expectations for the people ‘who have always been invisible’, as Lula put it . Whether their expectations will be fulfilled or dashed remains to be seen.
The G20 Leader’s Declaration
The most significant outcome of the summit and the year-long presidency was the Rio Declaration, embodying the consensus view of the G20, the only plurilateral grouping representing 85 per cent of the world’s GDP, over 75 per cent of world trade, and around 60 per cent of the world’s population. Its members include 19 developed and emerging economies and two regional bodies—the European Union and the African Union.
The Rio Declaration[7] comprises 85 tightly drafted paragraphs divided into five sections, symbolising the essence and culmination of extensive discussions among various stakeholders in the context of the previous summits. Some of its critical elements are highlighted here.
First, the portrayal of the world’s economic and political situation recognises a set of challenges and crises that the international community faces today, which require urgent action. It is candidly recognised that the world is nowhere near achieving the SDGs, as only 17 per cent of the SDG targets are on track. Regarding the ongoing conflicts in West Asia and Ukraine, participants were content with noting their negative impact without referring to any specific nations’ responsibility for commencing them.
Second, a substantial chunk of the declaration was understandably devoted to the three priorities of the Brazilian presidency, referred to earlier.
Third, as many as 25 paragraphs were devoted to various aspects of the interrelated themes of sustainable development, energy transitions and climate action. Climate finance, a subject of vital importance in this context, figured prominently. The new Delhi summit’s formulation that climate transition needed scaling up from ‘billions to trillions’ of dollars was recycled at Rio, but it hardly sounded convincing as the Rio summit failed to provide any concrete guidance to the United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP29) held in November 2024 in Baku, Azerbaijan. Besides, the G20 delegates were operating under the lengthening shadows of the likelihood of the next U.S. president walking out of the Paris agreement again, thereby causing a major setback to international consensus on the gravity of the climate crisis and the urgency of taking collective, calibrated action to save the planet in time.
Fourth, the summit prioritised global governance reforms, focussing on institutions such as the UN, WTO and Multilateral Development Banks (MDBs). The agreed formulation on the reform of the UN Security Council seems to have been taken from what was agreed at the preceding UN Summit of the Future. It states that the Security Council needs to enlarge and improve the representation of ‘underrepresented and unrepresented regions and peoples’ like Africa, Asia-Pacific, Latin America and the Caribbean . Whether this advances the specific cause of candidatures of countries like India, Brazil and South Africa is debatable. Carrying forward the work done during the Indian presidency, Brazil succeeded in finalising the G20 roadmap towards ‘Better, Bigger and more Effective’ MDBs, with the G20 calling for its early implementation and periodic progress reports.
Fifth, Rio presented the vision of an inclusive and effective G20 as it welcomed the participation of the African Union (which was granted entry as a full member at the previous summit) and the first-ever holding of the G20 foreign ministers meeting at the UN, which was open to all UN member states. Looking inward for self-improvement, G20 tasked the sherpas to evaluate the first cycle of the presidency during South Africa’s presidential tenure and produce a roadmap for future presidencies. If the South Africans had any inkling of how challenging their task may become due to future moves by the next G20 president, the U.S., the former kept it all to themselves!
In his speech at the closing session of the Rio G20 summit on 19 November 2024, President Lula highlighted several other achievements, such as the establishment of the Women’s Empowerment Working Group, the proposal to promote racial equality as the 18th SDG, and the creation of a Coalition for Local and Regional Production of Vaccines and medicines. The summit also welcomed the events from the WHO Investment round, believing that more resources were needed to respond to various health challenges, and approved a strategy to promote cooperation in open innovation and address asymmetries in scientific and technological production. After holding over 140 meetings across 15 Brazilian cities, the host government was able to ensure the adoption of ‘consensus statements in almost all working groups’.[8] Lula noted, ‘We left a lesson that the greater the interaction between the Sherpa and Finance tracks, the greater and more significant the results of our work will be’. He ended on a realistic note, ‘We worked hard, even though we knew we had only scratched the surface of the world’s profound challenges’. On handing over the G20 leadership baton to South Africa, Lula observed, ‘This is not an ordinary handover of the presidency. It is a concrete expression of the historical, economic, social, and cultural ties that unite Latin America and Africa’ .
A Critical Appraisal
Let us analyse two key questions: First, how well has Brazil performed, and second, where is the G20 heading now?
Assessing Rio’s decision-making performance, John Kirton and Brittaney Warren of the G20 research group at the University of Toronto concluded that the leaders made ‘174 collective, precise, future-oriented, politically binding commitments’.[9] The number was substantially lower than the 242 made in New Delhi in 2023, the 223 made in Bali in 2022 and the 255 made in Rome in 2021. ‘It was also below the average of 196 commitments made at each G20 summit from their start in 2008’, they noted .
In a lucid curtain-raiser, Purvaja Modak, a young Indian scholar, reviewed the prospects of Brazil’s G20 presidency that had just started, pointing out that the nation would ‘need to manage the intense geopolitical divisions that currently exist in the G20 membership to release joint statements’.[10] With a clear enunciation of its priorities, Brazil began its innings with much energy and enthusiasm. It seemed set to ‘lead the way in showing critics that the G20 is not a talk shop and is, in fact, the economic steering committee for the world it was intended to be at its inception’.
Writing a few days before the Rio G20 summit, two scholars at the German Institute for Global and Area Studies (GIGA) argued that the rich economies faced ‘new challenges in the change of unbalanced power relations, and the Global South will play a more prominent role’, adding that Lula would seek ‘pragmatic solutions’.[11]
As this essay shows, Brazil managed the geopolitical divide quite well and successfully produced consensus decisions on all critical issues. Sarang Shidore noted:
Brazil’s success at Rio demonstrated that, in a world in which the forces of fragmentation are ascendant, the G20 remains the one forum that can still bring the world’s key states together in one room and engage with each other. That may sound like a low bar, but it is, in fact, an achievement.[12]
This, in turn, raises the question about the G20’s ability to implement its decisions. By all accounts that is a more complicated question. Ideation is one thing, and the G20 undoubtedly excels in it, but carrying out the commitments is quite another matter, on which the jury is still out.
President Lula was quite candid and explicit on the larger question of the G20’s performance. He recalled that he attended the first G20 summit in 2008. ‘Sixteen years later, I am saddened to see that the world is even worse off’.[13] He referred to the following: more armed conflicts, more financial displacements, more extreme weather events and more inequity.
On the eve of the Rio G20 summit, UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres observed, ‘I have come to Rio with a simple message: G20 leaders must lead’.[14] Leaders do lead, particularly in terms of agreeing to detailed documents that explain the complex problems facing the world today and spelling out the way forward. However, once they return home, their political will to execute the commitments undertaken raises doubts. This creates a serious question mark on the future of the G20.
Another aspect relates to the Trumpian philosophy that has defined and shaped the U.S. approach to the world since January 2025. This is of immense relevance because the U.S. is the most powerful and influential member of the G20. It is scheduled to assume the G20 presidency after South Africa at the end of 2025. Will it do so? Or will it consider quitting the G20? Its role as the leader of the Group of Seven (G7) is also crucial. Suppose G7 unity is eroded further due to the Trans-Atlantic divergences and tensions, and the U.S. becomes unwilling to fulfil the diverse commitments it undertook during the pre-Trump 2.0 era. Such a phenomenon is certain to adversely impact the effectiveness of G20 during the remaining 2020s and beyond.
Assuming the G20 survives, it could emerge as quite a different kind of grouping. As the year 2025 unfolds further, more clarity should be available about the future of the G20. The transition of the presidency from Brazil to South Africa will thus become an exceptionally significant milestone in the history of the G20.
Rajiv Bhatia is the Distinguished Fellow for Foreign Policy Studies, and a former ambassador.
This article was first published as ‘Appraising Brazil’s G20 Presidency’ in the IIC Quarterly, Volume 52, No. 1, pp. 14–23.
[1] Summer 2025, Volume 52, Number 1
[2] Government of Brazil. 2023. ‘Speech by President Lula at the closing of the G20 Summit’, gov.br, 10 September. https://www.gov.br/planalto/en/followthe-government/speeches-statements/2023/speech-by-president-lula-at-theclosing-of-the-g20-summit (accessed 9 may 2025).
[3] Chand, Manish. 2023. ‘Brazil Will Carry Forward Legacy of India’s G20 Presidency: ambassador’, The Sunday Guardian, 1 October. https://sundayguardianlive.com/investigation/brazil-will-carry-forward-legacy-ofindias-g20-presidency-ambassador (accessed 9 may 2025).
[4] Government of Brazil. 2023. ‘Speech by President Lula at the closing of the G20 Summit’, gov.br, 10 September. https://www.gov.br/planalto/en/followthe-government/speeches-statements/2023/speech-by-president-lula-at-theclosing-of-the-g20-summit (accessed 9 may 2025).
[5] ‘Rio Declaration: G20 Social Launches a Global Call for Inclusion, Democracy, and Governance reforms’, G20 Brasil 2024, 16 November. https://g20.gov.br/en/news/g20-social-launches-a-global-callfor-inclusion-democracy-and-governance-reforms (accessed 9 may 2025).
[6] ‘Speech by Brazil’s President Lula at the launch of the Global alliance against hunger and Poverty’, G20 Brasil 2024, 18 November. https://g20.gov.br/en/documents/speeches/speech-by-brazils-president-lulaat-the-launch-of-the-global-alliance-against-hunger-and-poverty (accessed 9 may 2025).
[7] ‘G20 Rio de Janeiro Leaders’ Declaration’, G20 Brasil 2024, 18–19 November. https://g20.gov.br/en/documents/g20-rio-de-janeiroleaders-declaration (accessed 9 may 2025)
[8] ‘President Lula’s Speech at the Closing Session of the G20 Summit and handover of the Presidency to South Africa’, G20 Brasil 2024, 19 November. https://g20.gov.br/en/documents/speeches/president-lulasspeech-at-the-closing-session-of-the-g20-summit-and-handover-of-thepresidency-to-south-africa (accessed 10 may 2025).
[9] Kirton, John and Brittaney Warren. 2024. ‘The Rio Summit’s Solid Decision Making Performance’, G20 Information Centre, 19 November. https://www. g20.utoronto.ca/analysis/241119-kirton-decision-making.html (accessed 10 may 2025).
[10] Modak, Purvaja. 2024. ‘2024: Brazil’s G20 year’, G20 Information Centre, 18 January. https://www.g20.utoronto.ca/biblio/modak-2024-brazils-g20- year.html (accessed 10 may 2025).
[11] Marques, Tomas Costa De Azevedo and Nátaly Guilmo, 2024. ‘Brazil G20 Summit 2024: The Global South Takes Centre Stage’, GIGA, 6. https:// www.giga-hamburg.de/de/publikationen/giga-focus/brazil-g20-summit2024-the-global-south-takes-centre-stage (accessed 10 may 2025).
[12] Shidore, Sarang. 2024. ‘Brazil Pulled Off Successful G20 Summit’, Responsible Statecraft, 20 November. https://responsiblestatecraft.org/g20-brazil/ (accessed 10 may 2025).
[13] ‘Speech by Brazil’s President Lula at the launch of the Global alliance against hunger and Poverty’, G20 Brasil 2024, 18 November. https://g20.gov.br/en/documents/speeches/speech-by-brazils-president-lulaat-the-launch-of-the-global-alliance-against-hunger-and-poverty (accessed 9 may 2025).
[14] United nations. 2024. ‘ahead of G20 Summit in Brazil, Guterres Urges Bloc to Take the Lead on Peace, Climate and Other Challenges’, UN News, 17 November. https://news.un.org/en/story/2024/11/1157096 (accessed 10 may 2025).