G20 meeting will seek to provide leadership

Mexico will host an informal meeting of the G20 foreign ministers this weekend in Los Cabos, the coastal resort where the G20 Summit will take place in June. The idea is to hold a brainstorming exercise on today's most salient issues of global governance, drawing on the vision and experience in multilateral affairs of more than 20 foreign ministries across the world.

The fact that this is an informal exercise does not in any way diminish its relevance. For many, the key word during this year's Summit will be leadership. In the context of declining economic prospects and pressing global challenges that demand collective action, the current sense of impasse in multilateral institutions should concern us all. There seems to be a global governance gap, one that the G20 is called upon to bridge by providing a more vigorous and effective leadership. Having the foreign ministers of some of the most active countries in international affairs discussing openly and freely ways to improve global governance should be a welcome step forward.

The world is running out of time as it faces major challenges on a number of fronts that demand concerted action. Multilateral institutions keep working on these and other areas at a pace that is hardly encouraging. Even before the G20 was formalized as a high level forum in 2008, other groups such as the Group of Eight (G8), or the G8+5, where emerging economies played a role, were actively engaged in addressing challenging global economic and financial issues. In spite of the entrenched skepticism that often surrounds leaders' summits, the very fact that G20 countries have been effective in tackling difficult global economic problems by discouraging unilateral measures and fostering policy coherence makes the prospect of successful concerted action on other global matters all the more promising.