HSRC CONNECT | Ep 19 | G20 and W20 legacies and shared futures in a shifting geopolitical landscape

Описание: Purpose: To convene policymakers, researchers, and civil society to critically reflect on the G20 and W20’s collective impact across social policy, gender equality, care and inclusive governance, framed through the African philosophy of Ubuntu as a guiding principle for solidarity, reciprocity and shared responsibility while confronting the South Africa’s national, regional and international challenges.

Rationale: Recent G20 and W20 cycles have produced commitments and initiatives with global reach, yet current geopolitical shifts threaten to undermine multilateral solidarity and Southern leadership. South Africa’s exclusion from the G20 under the US Presidency in 2026 despite being Africa’s most industrialised economy and a voice for the Global South signals a troubling contraction of inclusive global governance. Under the incoming US G20 presidency, W20 and other engagement groups have been relegated to unofficial status. This demotion of gender and social policy priorities in favour of narrow business interests reflects a broader retreat from people-centred multilateralism.

A retrospective grounded in Ubuntu is therefore not merely academic but urgent: it surfaces how multilateral processes can resist transactional power politics, reclaim mutual care and dignity as organising principles, amplify Southern leadership despite structural marginalisation, and translate high-level pledges into people-centred practice. This panel asks whether meaningful global cooperation on gender equality and social justice remains possible when the architecture itself privileges economic power over human dignity, and what alternative solidarity mechanisms the Global South must forge in response.

Objectives
• Reflect critically on major achievements and shortcomings across G20 and W20 agendas, with particular attention to implementation gaps in the Global South.
• Analyze the geopolitical dimensions of South Africa’s G20 exclusion and the implications of the W20’s unofficial status under US leadership, interrogating what these shifts reveal about whose voices, priorities, and futures matter in global governance.
• Recenter Ubuntu as a normative lens and counter-hegemonic framework for multilateral policymaking that prioritises solidarity, reciprocity, community resilience, and African epistemologies in response to extractive and exclusionary governance models.
• Elevate Southern and African voices to assess how global commitments have affected local realities, and to articulate alternative visions for inclusive, dignified multilateralism
• Recommend practical, measurable priorities for engaging the incoming W20/US presidency despite its unofficial status, while simultaneously building South-South cooperation mechanisms and regional accountability frameworks that do not depend on Northern recognition.
• Catalyse research-policy partnerships to monitor progress, document exclusions, and co-produce solutions rooted in lived experience and Southern scholarship.