Relevance: GS-2: Bilateral, Regional, and Global Groupings and Agreements involving India and/or affecting India’s interests.

Key Phrases: G20, Intergovernmental forum, new model of international cooperation, Multilateral commitments, New conceptual framework, Economic diversification, digital-information-technology, public health.

Why in News?

• While India has taken a clear view of the role of the G20, there is concern that the agenda, themes, and focus areas that India will set for 2023 lack vision.

Need to reorient collaborations:

• Multilateral commitments on aid and trade are faltering. Governance in a world that is steadily becoming more equal needs institutional innovation.
  • This is because the role of the United Nations and the World Trade Organization in securing cooperation between donor and recipient country groups is losing centrality.
  • There are now three socio-economic systems — the G7, China-Russia, and India and the others — and they will jointly set the global agenda.
• Ukraine’s long shadow, rival finance, the expanding influence of the trade and value chains dominated by the U.S. and China, and the reluctance of developing countries to take sides in the strategic competition as they have a real choice require fresh thinking on the nature and form of collaboration from the G20.
• The primary role of the G20 needs to be reoriented to prevent a clash of ideas to the detriment of the global good.

AGENDA, THEMES, AND FOCUS AREAS THAT INDIA SHOULD SET FOR THE 2023 G20 SUMMIT:

• Need for a new conceptual framework:
  • The presumed equality that all countries are in the same boat, recognized in the case of climate change, needs to be expanded to other areas with a global impact redefining ‘common concerns.
  • Emerging economies are no longer to be considered the source of problems needing external solutions but the source of solutions to shared problems.
  • The BRICS provides an appropriate model for governance institutions suitable for the 21st century where a narrow group of states dominated by one power will not shape the agenda.
  • The starting point should be building on the global consensus in the Vienna Declaration on Human Rights 1993 reaffirming the indivisibility of all human rights.
    • There is a growing recognition of economic and social rights — for example, in the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development.
    • Ensuring adequate food, housing, education, health, water, and sanitation and work for all should guide international cooperation.
  • Principles of common but differentiated responsibilities for improving the quality of life of all households can guide deliberations in other fora on problems that seem intractable in multilateralism based on trade and aid.

Economic diversification through science and technology:

• The global agenda has been tilted towards investment, whereas science and technology are the driving force for economic diversification, sustainably urbanizing the world, and ushering the hydrogen economy and new crop varieties as the answer to both human well-being and global climate change.
• Innovation supports dematerializing production and consumption and moving towards renewable sources of energy.
• The shift in lifestyles in the post-war period created urban jobs in services and retail that made up for the losses to high productivity manufacturing, and climate change.
• A forum to exchange experiences on societal benefits and growth as complementary goals would lead to fresh thinking on employment and the environment.

Harnessing the potential of the digital-information-technology

• Harnessing the potential of the digital-information-technology revolution requires redefining digital access as a “universal service” that goes beyond physical connectivity to sharing specific opportunities available.
• For global society to reap the fruits of the new set of network technologies, open access software should be offered for more cost-effective service delivery options, good governance, and sustainable development.

Collaboration in Space technology:

• Space is the next frontier for finding solutions to problems of natural resource management ranging from climate change-related natural disasters and supporting agricultural innovation to urban and infrastructure planning.
• Analysing Earth observation data will require regional and international collaboration through existing centres that have massive computing capacities, machine learning, and artificial intelligence.
• Open access to geospatial data, data products, and services and lower costs of geospatial information technology facilities do not require huge financial resources.

Collaboration for public health:

• Public health has to learn from the COVID-19 fiasco with infectious diseases representing a market failure.
• A major global challenge is the rapidly growing antimicrobial resistance which needs new antibiotics and collaboration between existing biotechnology facilities.

Avoiding strategic competition

• Overriding priority to development suggests avoiding strategic competition.
• Countries in the region will support building on the 1971 UNGA Declaration designating for all time the Indian Ocean as a zone of peace and non-extension into the region of rivalries and conflicts that are foreign to it.

Revival of Global Financial Transaction Tax:

• A Global Financial Transaction Tax, considered by the G20 in 2011, needs to be revived to be paid to a Green Technology Fund for Least Developed Countries.

Conclusion:

• India’s presidency of G20 is an opportunity to reinvigorate, reinvent and re-centre the multilateral order.
• India must leave the G20 with the agility and energy to respond to new realities, and it must create a future-ready multilateralism through a novel and robust institutional architecture.

Source: The Hindu

Mains Question:

Q. How can India’s presidency of G20 be an opportunity to reinvigorate, reinvent and re-centre the multilateral order? Discuss.