Description
This paper examines why the New International Economic Order (NIEO) has not been explicitly revived during the recent sequence of Global South-led G20 presidencies, despite the persistence of many of the structural conditions that originally animated it. Focusing on the presidencies of Indonesia, India, Brazil and South Africa, the paper asks whether the NIEO has disappeared from contemporary global economic governance or whether its core concerns have been translated into a more pragmatic and institutionally acceptable language. It argues that these presidencies have not abandoned the NIEO agenda, but have reframed it through the vocabulary of debt sustainability, development finance, food and energy security, climate justice, digital inclusion, supply-chain resilience and multilateral reform. The G20, unlike the UN General Assembly of the 1970s, does not provide a platform for a comprehensive redistributive programme. Yet it has become a site where Global South states seek incremental reform from within existing institutions. The paper therefore contributes to debates on North–South relations, international political economy and global governance by showing how the NIEO survives less as a formal programme than as a fragmented reformist impulse within contemporary multilateralism.