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How SA’s G20 presidency can advance a more inclusive, socially just trade and climate governance architecture

How SA’s G20 presidency can advance a more inclusive, socially just trade and climate governance architecture
Faizel Ismail
By Faizel Ismail
15 Apr 2025
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South Africa has a unique role to play in the G20 process to build on the huge contribution earlier developing country presidencies have made to the G20 agenda and work programme. This includes aligning the major systemic challenges of the world on trade, agriculture, and infrastructure with that of the UN Sustainable Development Goals (Indonesia); reflecting the interests and voice of the south in each of the G20 working groups, including trade and investment, digital transformation, and the just energy transition (India); and a global commitment to work towards a sustainable planet, to recommit the G20 to an ambitious programme on climate action, and to build a Global Alliance against hunger and poverty (Brazil).

This is the first of a four-part op-ed series that is led by the Nelson Mandela School of Public Governance (UCT). The four op-eds together provide insights on the key themes that are being discussed by the world’s major economies. In this article the key issues that are on the G20 agenda are explained and the author sets out the priorities for the African continent that should be advanced by South Africa’s G20 Presidency. 

On 19 November 2024 President Lula da Silva of Brazil handed over the baton of the G20 Presidency to President Cyril Ramaphosa of South Africa. From 1 December 2024, South Africa assumed the presidency of the G20, a global forum of the largest economies in the world that first  came together in 2008 to address the global financial crisis that emerged in the United States (US). This is the first G20 to be held on African soil, and the first G20 for the African Union (AU) and the continent of Africa to be full participants.

President Ramaphosa made clear that he will stand for the interests of the African continent as a priority in South Africa’s G20 leadership. He will strive to build the solidarity of the Global South and work to build convergence with the G20’s richer northern economies and powers, based on the principles of multilateralism, equity, social justice, respect for diversity and development. 

South Africa has a unique role to play in the G20 process to build on the huge contribution earlier developing country presidencies have made to the G20 agenda and work programme. This includes aligning the major systemic challenges of the world on trade, agriculture, and infrastructure with that of the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) [Indonesia]; reflecting the interests and voice of the south in each of the G20 working groups, including trade and investment, digital transformation, and the just energy transition [India]; and a global commitment to work towards a sustainable planet, to recommit the G20 to an ambitious programme on climate action, and to build a Global Alliance against hunger and poverty [Brazil]. 

Climate change


The G20 presidencies have become increasingly focused on addressing issues related to climate change and finance. Thus, the agenda of the G20 has had to engage with the outcomes of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) Conference of the Parties (COP) meetings. It will be important for South Africa’s G20 Presidency to look forward to the next COP to be held in Brazil as a continuation of its agenda, especially on climate change. 

The climate crisis will need to focus on the need for more innovation in financial models to address the pressing needs of development finance and climate actions in mitigation, adaptation, resilience, and loss and damage. This includes the need to find creative ways to mobilise finance for development, especially for developing countries and Africa. 

President Ramaphosa announced at the handing-over ceremony on 17 November 2024 that South Africa’s G20 presidency would advance three high-level priorities, which would find expression in the work of the Sherpa and Finance Tracks:

  • Inclusive Economic Growth, Industrialisation, Employment and Inequality.

  • Food Security.

  • Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Innovation for Sustainable Development.


South Africa’s G20 presidency would pursue progress on these three cross-cutting issues by establishing three dedicated task forces. In addition, Ramaphosa expressed the priorities of South Africa as strengthening disaster resilience, ensuring debt sustainability for low-income countries, mobilising finance for a just energy transition, and harnessing critical minerals for inclusive growth and development. 

In adopting the motto of “Solidarity, Equality and Sustainable Development” South Africa is recalling the legacy of Nelson Mandela — the father of our democracy. In the first few years of his presidency Mandela expressed his commitment to the multilateral system, telling a meeting of the World Trade Organization that although South Africa had been a member of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade since its inception when “the vast majority of South Africans had no vote”, South Africa was committed to “vastly improving on the management of the world trading system to the mutual benefit of all nations and people”.

He committed South Africa to work for a rules-based multilateral trading system that was “just”. 

Thus, Mandela’s statement to the World Trade Organization expressed the need for a strengthened multilateral trading system that was fair, balanced, inclusive, and addressed the needs of the developing countries.

This approach to foreign policy and international economic relations and trade negotiations stands in sharp contrast to the approach of US President Donald Trump, who in his first presidency distinguished himself as a mercantilist with the motto, “Make America Great Again (Maga)”, and prides himself as a transactional leader and negotiator who uses the economic and political power of the United States to advance US national interests. 

Unilateral trade measures


The new Trump Administration (2.0) has both withdrawn from the Paris Climate negotiations in the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change once again and exacerbated the decline of the dysfunctionality of the multilateral trading system caused by its veto of appellate body members of the dispute settlement system and resort to unilateral trade measures being taken against a large number of countries, including Canada, Mexico, the EU and China.

There is increasing urgency for both developed and developing countries to implement their commitments to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, in accordance with commitments made under the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change and the Paris Agreement reached in Copenhagen in 2015. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change Sixth Assessment Report, published in April 2022, stated that “Africa had contributed among the least to greenhouse gas emissions, yet key development sectors had already experienced widespread loss and damage attributable to anthropogenic climate change, including biodiversity loss, water shortages, reduced food production, loss of lives and reduced economic growth”. 

The current systemic crises offer developing countries, and Africa in particular, an opportunity to leapfrog technologically and transform their economies. However, this cannot be achieved if the existing imbalanced, asymmetrical and inequitable framework of the global governance architecture in finance, trade and technology remain the same. Developed countries also have a responsibility and an obligation to provide developing countries with adequate climate finance, for mitigation, adaptation and resilience. These global institutions will need to make fundamental reforms if they are to be made fit for purpose. 

To unlock the current impasse in the World Trade Organization trade negotiations and contribute to advancing the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change Conference Of the Parties negotiations on climate change G20 members could agree on the following incremental reforms in the global trading system that support a just transition and climate resilient development in developing countries.

Policy recommendations for the G20



  1. Developed countries should recognise the principle of Special and Differential Treatment, and Common but Differentiated Responsibilities and Respective Capabilities as agreed in various World Trade Organization agreements and UN Framework Convention on Climate Change conferences. Together with these principles, all trade and climate agreements negotiated multilaterally should provide adequate policy and fiscal space to the developing countries to design their integrated trade-environment-development strategies.

  2. The Environmental Goods and Services Agreement being negotiated in the World Trade Organization should be inclusive and multilateral, rather than plurilateral and exclusive.

  3. The World Trade Organization can use the example of the 2001 Doha Ministerial Declaration on the Trade Related Intellectual Property Rights (Trips) Agreement and Public Health to also expand Trips flexibilities for developing countries in relation to climate-related goods and services. To provide developing countries with additional policy space to secure their climate and environment development initiatives, the World Trade Organization could agree on a time-limited climate waiver together with a “peace clause” for disputes on such measures.

  4. Developed economies such as the EU and the US that are considering applying Carbon Border Adjustment Measures against the imports from developing countries should rather support a positive trade agenda to encourage and help developing countries implement their mitigation commitments and adaptation development strategies.

  5. A Trade and Environment Fund could be established by the World Trade Organization and other multilateral institutions to provide additional finance to developing countries to source critical green technologies and build climate-smart trade infrastructure.

  6. All G20 members should agree to immediately reinstate the appellate body of the World Trade Organization, which has succeeded in maintaining a rules-based trading system for more than 70 years since the onset of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade in 1947.

  7. All G20 members should commit to immediately refraining from applying unilateral trade measures and restoring the integrity of the multilateral trading system.


During South Africa’s G20 presidency developing countries should also engage with the major powers, build their own South-South coalitions, and advance campaigns to reform the global trade, finance, environment, and other UN agencies — creating greater coherence in global governance. South Africa’s presidency offers developing countries the opportunity to consolidate the work of the past three developing country G20 presidencies of Indonesia, India and Brazil. 

For developing countries and indeed all of humanity this is perhaps the last opportunity to also make a transformative shift in our values; from prioritising, profit, wealth and power for the few, towards inclusiveness, cooperation, solidarity, social justice, equity and a more harmonious relationship with nature in a Green New Deal as proposed by UN Conference on Trade And Development. DM

Professor Faizel Ismail is the Director of the Nelson Mandela School of Public Governance at the University of Cape Town. He has served as the Ambassador Permanent Representative of South Africa to the WTO (2010-2014). He is the author of three books on the World Trade Organization.

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Letters will be edited.

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