PurposeThe Group of 20 (G20) is tasked with responding to economic shocks in the global financial system, with COVID-19 having proved to be the most significant shock since the G20's inception. COVID-19 also represents the first economic crisis accompanied by a concerted attempt to “build back better”, principally through a climate-compatible recovery. In 2021, there is little clarity as to the G20's response to this challenge, primarily due to considerable divergence in the green stimulus practices of its member states. The paper aims to investigate whether the G20, climate change and COVID-19 are critical juncture or critical wound.Design/methodology/approachHistorical institutionalism (HI) suggests that one can explain an institution's future response by reference to its developmental pathway to date. This contribution adopts its concept of “critical junctures” to shed light on the G20's possible institutional response to COVID-19. The contribution undertakes a comparative analysis of the global financial crisis (GFC) and COVID-19 as possible critical junctures for the G20.FindingsIn doing so, the work demonstrates that the G20 “building back better” from COVID-19 requires a shift away from its institutional orthodoxy to a much larger degree than its response to the GFC. Accordingly, whilst both the GFC and COVID-19 may be considered critical junctures for the G20, only COVID-19 has the potential to be a “critical wound” that leads to institutional redundancy.Research limitations/implicationsThrough interrogating this further, this exposition prospectively outlines two possible futures the G20 faces as a consequence of COVID-19: reform or redundancy. In this way, it offers an ex ante perspective on policy-reform options for the G20's ongoing response to COVID-19.Practical implicationsWhichever choice the G20 makes in its response to COVID-19 has profound consequences for global governance in an increasingly unpredictable world.Originality/valueHerein lies the importance of an exploratory assessment of COVID-19 as a critical juncture or a critical wound for the G20.

Current headlines suggest that the world at large has missed the opportunity to ‘build back better’ from COVID-19 by way of a green recovery. However, such claims do not consider novel trends among plurilateral summit institutions, especially the extent to which global governance of a green recovery is encapsulated by the burgeoning norm bundle of the ‘Global Green New Deal’. Plurilateral summit institutions like the G20, G7 and the BRICS have the potential to play a key governance role in implementing a Global Green New Deal, given the breadth and depth of reform required to ‘build back better’ from COVID-19. This contribution adopts a practice-relationist methodology to explore this thesis. Green recovery practice is analysed through novel interrogation of the open-source stimulus spending data of the Global Recovery Observatory. The results reveal that the G7, the G20 and the BRICS are all funding proportionally more clean than dirty stimulus in response to COVID-19. However, the proportion of clean stimulus is much stronger among members of the G7. A relationist frame is then used to assess this practice against the potential norm entrepreneurship role of the G7, both as individual member states and as a collective. It concludes that although this norm entrepreneurship role is undoubtedly nascent, it yields valuable insights into the pathways and barriers for further norm diffusion of the Global Green New Deal among plurilateral summit institutions. In this way it highlights the unique role plurilateral summit institutions can play in not only globalising the green new deal, but crucially operationalising it. Thus, while the world may not yet be ‘building back better’ as a collective, it is institutional norm entrepreneurs who currently hold the blueprints.

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