Turkey held the presidency of the G20 (Group of 20) from December 2014 to November 2015. During this period geopolitical tensions started to spread beyond the borders of the regions involved. Turkey went through a challenging time, with a slowing economy, two elections in 2015, revived political confrontations, two million refugees and frustrations in securing its borders and handling terrorism. Turkey defined three priorities for its presidency: inclusiveness, implementation and investment for growth. To combat inequality and ensure inclusive growth, it aimed to address the issues of small and medium-sized enterprises, such as access to finance, skills and global value chains, employment for youth and women, and support to the development of low-income countries. Inclusiveness was also explicit in G20 engagement with social partners. Implementation was emphasized, particularly related to the imperative to deliver on the G20 members’ commitments regarding growth strategies made at the 2014 Brisbane Summit.

This article assesses the G20’s performance under the Turkey presidency within a functional paradigm focusing on the three main objectives of plurilateral summitry institutions: strengthening capacity for political leadership to launch new ideas and overcome deadlocks, reconciling domestic and international pressures, and consolidating collective management. To attain those objectives, institutions are expected to demonstrate leadership, solidarity, sustainability, acceptability, consistency and continuity. Efficiency is perceived as G20 performance on a combination of the criteria. Given the G20’s ultimate mission to achieve strong, sustainable, balanced and inclusive growth, all the issues on Turkey’s G20 agenda were grouped according to these four growth pillars.

G20 performance on each of the issue areas was assessed on six criteria using a three-point scale: high (1), medium (0) and low (−1) degree of performance. The overall assessment of G20 performance efficiency was estimated as the total of the average scores in each issue area divided by 11 (the number of policy areas on the agenda). Recognizing that implementation is crucial to G20 legitimacy, leadership and solidarity, Turkey made it one of its presidency’s priorities. Thus, the quality of accountability and level of compliance are considered within each policy area. The quality of engagement is included in the assessment of the acceptability of G20 decisions within respective policy areas, with the format of G20 engagement with outreach, including social partners, international institutions and non-G20 countries, explored in a separate section.

The analysis showed that the G20 under the Turkish presidency attained a high level of consistency and continuity in all issues, ensuring the consistency of decisions across policy areas and their compatibility with the agenda of previous presidencies and G20 core agenda. Sustainability and acceptability were also quite high, as the G20 ensured the longevity of collectively produced solutions and got the endorsement of the decisions by other governments, international institutions and social partners. However, the Turkish presidency lacked leadership, showing not enough capacity to exercise political authority and overcome deadlocks, which could be partly explained by the challenges of the internal situation in Turkey. The lowest level was registered for solidarity as some G20 members did not fully commit to certain decisions and parts of the programs and documents were perceived as voluntary. The G20 displayed many of the features of plurilateral summitry institutions in all the areas under the goal of balanced growth and almost all with regard to the goal of inclusive growth. On sustainable growth, the performance was mixed on both energy and climate change. With a relatively high average for strong growth, the outcomes by issue were uneven: relatively high on macroeconomic cooperation and investment, and rather low on trade. The trade agenda was the only one with negative scores for leadership and solidarity, proving to be one of the most persistent challenges for the G20.