G-group legitimacy in global governance: rightful membership of rising powers?

The shift in global policymaking from the Group of Seven (G7) to the Group of Twenty (G20) is widely seen to reflect the rise to power of emerging markets in the South. It begs the question, though, whether the G20 has the right membership to legitimately govern the global economy. This paper applies a novel framework linking rightful membership to global governance institutions’ roles to address this question. A longitudinal analysis of (1) financial and economic indicators of G-group members; (2) their global ranking on these indicators; and (3) the position of G-group members in technical forums of financial governance demonstrates that the shift to the G20 was necessary to maintain rightful membership given the declining share of G7 members in the global economy. However, rightful membership as a source of legitimacy varies across G-group roles and diffuses across roles and across global governance institutions. These new insights demonstrate the added value of conceptualising rightful membership in relation to different roles of global governance institutions. The analytical framework proposed in this paper allows for better insights into the legitimation strategies and public legitimacy perceptions of global governance institutions, and points to interesting new hypotheses with respect to the legitimacy of global governance institutions.