The G20 summit is here. How is Brazil trying to reshape global development?

The world’s largest economies are gearing up for the Group of 20 largest and emerging economies’ summit, a two-day affair that will bring some of global development’s most pressing issues to the center stage. The summit comes after a year of events hosted by Brazil, this year’s G20 president — and after a multitude of discussions around fighting hunger, poverty, and inequality across the world. Along the way, Brazil has made a slew of headlines — from its proposed wealth tax on the world’s billionaires to its road map for multilateral development bank reform. “The G20 is nothing but a space where you put people in a room together to make joint decisions by consensus,” said Maitê Gauto, a director of programs at Oxfam Brasil. “So the fact that they are coming together with some clear agreements — and that that’s been driven by the global south, and not just following what the U.S. or Germany or France wants to happen — is quite historic.” As Brazil nears the end of its presidency, the government hopes that on Nov. 18 and 19, the G20 Summit will cement many of those efforts into place, especially as the world braces for the return of former United States President Donald Trump. “The first time I went to Rio this year, it was the week that Biden had stepped down and Harris had become the nominee,” said Ananya Kumar, a deputy director at the Atlantic Council, a Washington, D.C.-based think tank. “It was the question that everyone was asking. What happens now, and how do we ensure that this institution is not impacted?” Why does the G20 matter? Every year, the leaders of the G20 nations — which represent two-thirds of the world’s population and 85% of its gross domestic product, or GDP — gather to discuss economic, financial, and international issues. Since 1999, the group has worked as a deliberative body, attempting to foster consensus amidst the world’s largest economies. In the past, the G20 has tackled the 2008 financial crisis, the COVID-19 pandemic, and the Syrian civil war, ultimately publishing “communiques,” or formal consensus statements, on topics of concern. Decisions made through the G20 aren’t legally binding, but voluntary commitments by member nations can push future action forward. “It has always been difficult for the G20 to find common ground that was obvious,” said Paul Samson, president of the Centre for International Governance Innovation, or CIGI, a Canadian think tank. “There are reasons to be skeptical about what comes out of it, and how effective the G20 is. But at the same time, it's a huge mistake to discount its importance.” The heavyweight group is made up of 19 countries — Argentina, Australia, Brazil, Canada, China, France, Germany, India, Indonesia, Italy, Japan, Korea, Mexico, Saudi Arabia, South Africa, Russia, Turkey, the United Kingdom and the United States — and two regional bodies, the African Union and the European Union. Representatives from the largest multilateral organizations — such as the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, the World Trade Organization, and the United Nations — are also invited to attend, along with several other nations. And this year, the main summit is following the first-ever G20 Social Summit, a multiday convening for civil society organizations, think tanks, businesses, and others to discuss the main pillars of this year’s G20: hunger and inequality, climate change and sustainability, and global governance reform. Despite the heavy hitters, all eyes are on Brazil, the nation steering the G20 agenda. On the first day of Brazil’s G20 presidency, the country’s leader — Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva — set the priorities for his country’s presidency: fighting hunger and poverty, responding to the climate crisis, and reforming global financial institutions. “We really need to make it clear who should pay for climate action — and the answer, fairly obviously, is that it shouldn’t be ordinary people footing the bill.” --— Kate Blagojevic, an associate director at 350.org But with the summit occurring just two weeks after the U.S. elected Trump into power, many are wondering how much of what’s decided will stick. For several years, the presidency of the G20 has moved from one emerging market to another — from Indonesia to India, from India to Brazil, and after this month, from Brazil to South Africa. But in 2026, the G20 presidency will move back to the U.S. — and there is a risk that progress on things like inequality, food insecurity, and taxes on the ultrarich could be lost. Here’s what we’ll be watching as some of the world's biggest players descend on Rio de Janeiro next week — and how decisions made at the G20 could impact global development for years to come. Hunger in the spotlight Brazil’s president has made fighting hunger a hallmark — not just of the G20 presidency, but throughout all three of his own domestic terms. During Lula’s first two terms in office in the early 2000s, government policy halved the percentage of people going hungry in Brazil, along with the rate of childhood malnutrition and mortality. Those numbers ticked up after the COVID-19 pandemic. But a year after Lula came into power for a third time, his government announced that severe food insecurity had dropped by 85% in a single 12-month period. That fall was due to a rise in incomes, a boost to the minimum wage, reductions in unemployment, and other domestic policies, according to data from the Fome Zero Institute, the country’s flagship hunger eradication program. And after taking on the G20 presidency, Brazil sought to expand those successes worldwide. Earlier this year, the country announced the creation of the Global Alliance Against Hunger and Poverty — an initiative that aims to connect countries with the policies, partnerships, and resources they need to end hunger. In July, the alliance’s structure was endorsed at a ministerial meeting; over the weekend, the alliance will host a festival with art, music and lightshows. And next week, the initiative will be formally launched at the opening ceremony of the G20 Summit. “It’s an initiative of a very, very influential developing country, with a very, very influential leader,” said Oliver Camp, an environment and food systems advocacy adviser at the Global Alliance for Improved Nutrition, or GAIN, a Swiss-based nongovernmental organization. “I think that’s new, and that’s helpful.” The alliance centers on a “policy basket” — a collection of policies that have been proven to end hunger and poverty in countries across the world — and a matchmaking program, which will be used to connect countries to the technical or financial assistance they need to implement hunger-curbing legislation. The alliance aims to be a “mediator,” the initiative’s founding documents state, one that fosters “cooperation among members … in a country-led, demand-driven process.” Through the alliance, for example, partners could contribute funding or technical support to improve a country’s school meal programs, while organizations like the World Bank could provide additional resources to extend the program’s reach. “Brazil is doing this based on rich experience as a country,” said Camp. “Although I don’t want to make a case study of very real human suffering, it does demonstrate that progressive policies in fairly short order can create huge impacts in eliminating hunger.” Through GAIN’s involvement in the alliance, Camp has had a front-row seat to its progress. He said that 45 countries are in the process of signing onto the alliance and another 65 have expressed interest. Though official numbers haven’t been made public yet, Germany became the first country in the G20 to join the alliance last month, and Norway, Paraguay, Antigua and Barbuda signed on this week. Going forward, the alliance will be maintained by a “support mechanism,” whose staff will be seconded from the United Nations and its agencies, international finance institutions, and international organizations. Its offices will be hosted by the Food and Agricultural Organization in Rome, and operate within a $2 million to $3 million a year budget, according to the alliance’s foundational documents. International agencies and organizations from across the development world are also getting involved, including the World Bank, The Rockefeller Foundation, the World Food Programme, World Vision, and CGIAR. And just this week, a group of 118 nongovernmental organizations began circulating a petition urging countries to sign on to the alliance, with the warning that “now is the time to act to prevent unnecessary suffering.” “This is not just another new initiative,” said Camp.“This is very much an idea to reduce fragmentation, align existing efforts, and provide the practical support and high-level political leadership to do so.” A push for climate action The G20 Summit is happening at the same time as the 29th U.N. Climate Change Conference, or COP29, in Baku, Azerbaijan. Many delegates will be making a (rather carbon-unfriendly) 7,400-mile trip to catch both, as Brazil has made climate change a pivotal focus of the G20’s agenda. In many ways, Brazil’s focus on climate has set the tone for all other discussions at the G20. It’s fed into conversations on reforming the multilateral development banks, relaxing debt burdens, and taxing the wealthy, as all three approaches could help finance the world’s response to climate change. And throughout that time, Brazil has tried to lead by example. In July, the South American nation and the United States agreed to work together on improving clean energy supply chains, carbon markets, biodiversity finance, and multilateral climate funds. In October, Brazil launched a new platform for climate-focused projects — one that sought to link domestic initiatives with international financing. And just this week, Brazil presented its new climate ambitions in Baku: Reducing net greenhouse gas emissions to 67% below 2005 levels by 2035. But despite Brazil’s efforts, many say the country hasn’t gone far enough. The G20 is responsible for 80% of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions, according to a report commissioned by the G20 earlier this year. And because of that, the authors state, G20 countries should be responsible for 80% of the reductions. “There are things that we were hoping the Brazilian presidency would have pushed more strongly, and from what we hear, they didn’t because there were objections by powerful group members,” said Luiz Vieira, the coordinator of the Bretton Woods Project, a nongovernmental organization that focuses on the World Bank and the IMF. Still, Brazil has led international efforts too, from launching a $125 billion tropical rainforest fund to pushing for a 2% tax on the world’s richest — the latter of which could unlock some $250 billion to address climate change. In the G20’s concluding documents on climate, world leaders committed to a series of climate-related actions, including “strengthening the full and effective implementation” of the Paris Agreement, calling for the implementation of the U.N.’s Early Warnings for All initiative, and aligning the reform of international financial institutions to better fight climate change. Next week, world leaders will continue to discuss “strategies to promote a greener and more sustainable global economy,” according to Brazil’s G20 presidency — and they are expected to continue dialogue on a number of different ways to bolster climate finance, including a tax on the world’s richest 3,000 people. “Thanks to recent progress in international tax cooperation, a common taxation standard for billionaires has become technically possible. Implementing it is a question of political will.” --— Gabriel Zucman, a French economist and author of the G20-commissioned report on taxation “On the one hand, we're saying: Look, we need to change the MDB system,” said Ivan Oliveira, the deputy secretary for sustainable finance at Brazil’s Ministry of Finance. “And on the other hand, we need to change the climate architecture. We need to make that concessional money better connected to what countries need. And that money needs to flow.” Despite that, there’s a question of how long any of this lasts amid a looming Trump presidency. At COP29, U.S. climate envoy John Podesta said that the fight “for a cleaner, safer” planet won’t end just because Trump is reentering power — but with the president-elect’s plans to deregulate the energy sector, pull the U.S. from the Paris Agreement, and allow the oil and gas industry to “drill, baby, drill,” many aren’t so sure. “There's a bunch of tension around it, but things are not converging other than the fact that climate change’s impacts are rolling along — and we should expect those to get worse,” said Samson from the CIGI. A tax on the world’s wealthiest It’s one of the shiniest and perhaps most ambitious debates facing the G20: whether the group will commit to a 2% tax on the richest people across the world. The proposal is rooted in a study by Gabriel Zucman, a French economist who posited that taxing the world’s richest 3,000 people could unlock $250 billion in annual tax revenue. Zucman found that today, billionaires are taxed at rates of just 0% to 0.6%, often due to their utilization of financial loopholes and offshore accounts. For the proposal to work, countries would need to both tax their own billionaires and those who are from other countries, granted the latter are undertaxed at home and derive some of their wealth abroad. “Thanks to recent progress in international tax cooperation, a common taxation standard for billionaires has become technically possible,” Zucman wrote in his report, which was commissioned by the G20. “Implementing it is a question of political will.” That’s something Brazil — and several other G20 nations — have been pushing for, and it will be a proposition that many are watching as next week unfolds. “What we expect is not an agreement for one specific global wealth tax, but a commitment to the idea of taxing the super rich,” said Susana Ruiz, global tax justice policy lead at Oxfam International. “It’s not like the day after [the summit], we’ll have a global agenda on taxing the super-rich. But it’s a starting point for something that has been impossible until now.” Earlier this year, the G20 finance ministers took an unprecedented step, Ruiz explained: The group agreed on the need to tax the superrich. In a ministerial declaration, the G20 recognized the need for ultrahigh-net-worth individuals to pay their fair share in taxes, and committed to “exchanging best practices, encouraging debates around tax principles, and devising anti-avoidance mechanisms” to ensure they do so. Despite that, the ministers did not agree on a specific taxation rate or a timeline for setting that tax, or exactly where that tax would go if it is ultimately collected. Brazil has advocated for those funds to be used to alleviate global poverty and increase climate financing — especially because the studies have shown the richest 1% of the population emit as much as the poorest 66% combined. “It costs money to start rolling out windfarms, to start rolling out solar power, and to start rolling out heat pumps,” said Kate Blagojevic, an associate director at environmental organization 350.org. “We really need to make it clear who should pay for climate action — and the answer, fairly obviously, is that it shouldn’t be ordinary people footing the bill.” Blagojevic is hopeful that more details on the tax will come out of the summit next week, but said she expects G20 members will find it difficult to agree on a specific figure. “It will be interesting to see if the leaders will be able to agree next week,” Blagojevic added. “But we’ll also be looking toward next year, and looking at how the South African presidency will take this forward.” ‘Better, bigger and more effective’ multilateral development banks Reforming the world’s multilateral development banks has long been on the G20 agenda. Italy began the push during its 2021 presidency, when it created an independent panel to review MDBs’ capital adequacy frameworks — the set of rules each bank uses to ensure they have enough capital to manage risks, maintain their credit ratings, and remain financially stable during difficult times. That work continued under the Indonesian and Indian G20 presidencies, and just over a year ago, the group committed to pushing for better, bigger and more effective MDBs under India’s presidency. Last month, the Brazilian presidency published a road map for doing so, one that was backed by months of research commissioned by the G20. The road map was endorsed by finance ministers in Washington, D.C., during the World Bank and IMF annual meetings last month. And next week, it’s expected that the G20 heads of state will follow suit. “This road map is really a balance between where the G20 members want to push the system, and where we also take into account the banks’ positions, and where they're better placed to move faster or first,” said the Brazilian Ministry of Finance’s Oliveira. “As much as possible, we wanted to do something that could really change and move the needle.” Through 13 short- and medium-term recommendations, the road map served as the final output for Brazil’s presidency on the MDB front. The recommendations include supporting “country-owned, country-led platforms,” so MDBs can better plan, coordinate, and address government priorities; scaling up local currency and hedging solutions, including through the development of strong domestic investor bases; and creating incentives to spur MDB cooperation and coordination. ` “The G20 are the main shareholders of multilateral development banks, so everything that is supported and endorsed by the G20 is certainly going to have an impact on the decision-making of the MDBs themselves,” said Marina Zucker-Marques, a senior academic researcher at Boston University’s Global Economic Governance Initiative. “Strong language from the heads of states, the governors, the ministers of finance is a clear message that this is an area they should be focusing on.” Zucker-Marques’ research found that to meet the scale of investment needed to achieve the Sustainable Development Goals, MDB lending will need to triple by 2030. “Multilateral development banks are the institutions that provide lower interest rates, and that’s why we need them to fill in the gap,” said Zucker-Marques, whose research was commissioned by the G20 earlier this year, and ultimately fed into the road map. “I think this is the best bet that we can actually meet the climate and development needs that developing countries have.” A ‘lame duck’ on debt But of course, no conversation about lending can come without a conversation on debt — and about the fact that today, countries across the world have too much of it. Today, 54 low- and middle-income countries are spending more than 10% of their revenues on net interest payments, while 3.3 billion people live in countries that spend more on those interest payments than they do on education or health, according to research from the U.N. Trade and Development, or UNCTAD. “The level of debt that severely affects some developing countries strangles any investment in infrastructure, well-being, and sustainability,” said Lula, speaking at a G20 foreign ministers meeting in September. “There is more money coming out of these countries than going in.” His words were nothing new for the G20, which has been trying to solve the global debt crisis for years. In 2020, the institution created the Common Framework on Debt, a mechanism designed to restructure debt for low-income countries struggling to repay it. Despite that, the effort has largely been seen as duplicative and ineffective, taking years for countries to negotiate with their creditors. “The idea was to create a more effective, faster resolution process that would bring all the actors together,” said Eric LeCompte, the executive director of Jubilee USA Network, a nonprofit focused on financial reform. “Most G20 countries want to move forward the Common Framework and make it stronger — but that work has been slow, and there certainly have been challenges.” Throughout the year, Brazil’s G20 presidency has tried to push forward a number of initiatives to do that — from the creation of an international bankruptcy process to the launch of a liquidity proposal that would give countries bridge financing to cover their debt, LeCompte said. But both efforts, he added, have been fraught with challenges. “While there have been some big plans and big proposals and initiatives put forward by the Brazilian government, we're not seeing a lot of definitive action and implementation — even on some of the things that were low hanging fruit, like this liquidity bridge proposal,” LeCompte told Devex. At the summit, heads of state are expected to affirm the overarching list of commitments from the G20 finance ministers’ meeting in July. That includes calls to step up the Common Framework’s implementation “in a predictable, timely, orderly, and coordinated manner,” support the Global Sovereign Debt Roundtable (a partnership between the G20, IMF, and the World Bank to address debt restructuring), and take on lessons learned from a G20-produced document focused on the four countries that have actually been through the Common Framework process: Chad, Ethiopia, Ghana, and Zambia. Because of that, LeCompte said, next week is likely to be more of a “lame duck summit” when it comes to debt. “I don’t think we’re going to see any kind of horse trading or ambition to arrive at anything more significant on debt,” he added. “At this point, it would be up to the South African presidency [of the G20 in 2025], and then the U.S. presidency [of the G20] in 2026, to move forward with any sort of implementation.” And while South Africa is gearing up to take the reins, Trump has made his preference for bilateral negotiations clear. As a result, some experts are questioning whether the U.S. president-elect will downgrade the role of forums like the G20 in the years to come — especially once his own country hosts the group in 2026. “Trump has clearly said he doesn't believe in multilateralism,” explained CIGI’s Samson. “So, he could actually just kind of marginalize the G20 and say: ‘I don't see this as a useful forum. Yeah, we'll host it. I'll show up for a couple minutes and say something, but I'm not taking this seriously.’”