The power of five: building a stronger partnership
- By Yu Lintao
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E-mail Beijing Review, September 3, 2017
All-round cooperation
After a decade, the BRICS agenda is becoming more comprehensive, touching upon issues not only confined to the economy and trade but also related to global and regional security, global governance and climate change.
"BRICS is no longer merely an economic concept. Its role as a platform for emerging economies to coordinate their stance on world political governance is growing," Wang Lei said.
According to Srikanth Kondapalli, a professor of international studies at the Jawaharlal Nehru University in New Delhi, as rising economies, BRICS nations are becoming ever more influential in international relations.
To effectively play this larger role, their coordination and exchanges are being significantly strengthened. At the initial foreign ministers' informal meeting in 2006, BRICS set up a framework that promoted cooperation in numerous areas. Besides the summit, there are more than 30 ministerial-level cooperation mechanisms covering trade, diplomacy, security, culture and anti-terrorism. The New Development Bank (NDB) established by the bloc is working to fund infrastructure projects and acts as a supplement to the Asian Development Bank and the World Bank.
In addition, more than 20 non-governmental entities have been established to promote people-to-people exchanges.
As Kondapalli stressed, BRICS is definitely not a "talk-shop." It has set concrete agendas on a number of issues such as opposing trade protectionism and voting rights in the IMF and the World Bank.
In the final analysis, the different functions of BRICS are intended to add up to one major mandate—to address the power imbalance and inequality in today's world by nudging global economic governance toward a more equitable direction. For this, as Ni said, BRICS should develop its role as a platform for South-South cooperation.
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