On May 26-27, Valdai Club experts took part in the summit of T20, an offshoot of G20, in Tokyo. The event will feature presentation of a communique with recommendations for the G20 leaders who are to meet in Osaka on June 28-29.
The Valdai Club has participated in the T20 process, which brings together the leading think tanks of G20, since 2018. As part of the task force “Social Cohesion, Global Governance and the Future of Politics,” the Club’s experts prepared a policy brief, “Regional Trade Blocs as Supporting Structures in Global Governance,” which was presented at the Global Solutions summit in Berlin last March.
The policy brief’s main point is that cooperation between states at the regional level plays an increasingly important role amid the crisis of global institutions and growing protectionist tendencies. Regional integration blocs (EAEU in Eurasia, ASEAN in Southeast Asia, Mercosur in South America etc) are a new important in-between layer of global governance (between global institutions like WTO or IMF and nation states). But there is a lack of mechanisms of both horizontal (among the regional economic blocs) and vertical coordination (between these blocs and global institutions). The Valdai Club’s proposition is creating such mechanisms within G20, which is a unique platform bringing together developed countries of the Global North and developing countries of the Global South.
