As a global leadership forum, G20 summits provide an opportunity to transform international interactions into new patterns of negotiation and new forms of behaviour, resulting in new global breakthroughs. So far, leadership within the G20 forum has, however, been tentative, minimalist and too often narrowly circumscribed by the primacy of member governments’ domestic concerns and constraints. G20 leaders have yet to hit their stride in finding modes of discourse, debate and decision that strengthen global regimes for managing global challenges and that convincingly address the anxieties and concerns of their publics.

The National Perspectives on Global Leadership (NPGL) project considers public perceptions of summitry and the performance of national leaders in more than a dozen G20 countries. Published online as the NPGL Soundings series, this collection comprises a substantial body of factual and interpretive insights on the five most recent summits.

As host of the sixth G20 summit later this year, France is under pressure to succeed in resolving visible issues and delivering on the existing agenda. A CIGI report considers the issues facing the French G20 presidency and the need for the G20 to define its role quickly or risk becoming irrelevant.

The G20 has shown itself capable of robust action in the wake of the international financial crisis. Now it needs to advance its role beyond the immediacy of crisis response. In the third instalment of CIGI’s G20 papers series, Distinguished Fellow Andrew F. Cooper and Senior Fellow Colin Bradford Jr. examine the G20 process as it moves from crisis response to economic management.