The G-20 and Inequalities
Viviana Santiago, executive director of Oxfam Brazil. This article was written for issue 149 of the WBO newsletter, dated January 10, 2025. To subscribe and receive free weekly news and analyses like this, simply enter your email in the field provided.
The G-20 is one of the main spaces for global governance. In this space, which brings together the main economies based on a logic of strengthening cooperation between countries, it is possible to address the main issues of our era.
In leading this space, Brazil has prioritized the reform of international governance, sustainability dimensions, and the fight against hunger and poverty, but the question we ask ourselves here is: Has that been enough?
Thinking about international governance is urgent, but from a perspective of inclusion. The question that arises is, therefore, how can we build dynamics of cooperation and promotion of development without there being adequate representation of the different contexts? What metrics do we use when we bring up ideas such as development, cooperation, and sustainability?
To have a development model that leaves no one behind, it is necessary to decolonize the idea of development, understand the impacts of coloniality on the formation of contexts, and be able to identify the resistance strategies constructed by each of them.
In this sense, by opening up space for intense social participation, the G-20 summit held in Brazil points to the following path: it is through dialogue and the construction of a governance structure that brings civil society closer to the States that a new grammar for development will be constructed. Addressing this, considering that population demands are not the same, but recognizing the different groups that make up society, was key to the demands of women, the Black population, and the favelas, as well as to formulating paths from which responses will emerge. The intense exchange with South Africa, which allows us to think about the African context beyond tokenism and stereotypes, worked to point out paths for transformation.
All the social participation and formulations present in the Sherpa Track functioned as a space for articulation and regrouping of civil society around an agenda and a space that are not usually intended for these audiences and these themes.
But we have challenges: how can we make the Finance Track more open to contributions from civil society? How can we ensure that a Eurocentric and colonial vision, according to which only a few enlightened individuals, mostly men, mostly white, would be able to understand the meaning of the discussions, is not enough? Everyone has the right to participate in decisions that affect their lives, and in this sense, it is necessary to guarantee everyone the full conditions for participation. Under the presidency of Brazil, the G-20 built a powerful space for civil society participation, but in all its diversity, civil society representatives did not feel sufficiently in dialogue with the Finance Track. Presenting proposals is not dialogue. Dialogue is meeting, sharing, having one's considerations answered.
Let us also move forward in the consideration that a diverse society needs to have the demands of all groups addressed in the construction of spaces and demands. How can we be sure that the G-20 agenda builds this dialogue?
At the end of Brazil's presidency of the G-20, we need to look for lessons learned. After all, to what extent were all the working groups able to build an intersectional approach that would allow their proposals to neither maintain nor reproduce inequalities? For whom did we pressure global leaders? Whom did we leave behind?
More than just having a group of women, a group of favelas, a group of Black people, we need to think about how we will move forward in analyses and proposals that perceive the populations in their entirety and, above all, develop the capacity to include those who are systematically left behind, rendered invisible because their lives can be left to die.
May South Africa move forward, may this path be strengthened, may no one be left behind.
