The liberal multilateral order and organizations from their foundations in the 1940s are on the rise, not in decline. Importantly, this is due to the G20 work since its start in 2008. The G20's Osaka Summit will do even more to help them meet the complex challenges the world faces today.

The organizational core of the liberal multilateral order is the Bretton Woods bodies of the International Monetary Fund and World Bank that were set up in 1944, the United Nations, which was established in 1945, and its functional agencies led by the World Health Organization in 1948 and the International Labor Organization now celebrating its centenary. All these are alive and well, and now include all major powers old and new. The same is true of the later United Nations Environmental Programme, the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change and UN Biodiversity, and even the World Trade Organization. Moreover, in September 2015 world leaders came to the UN to launch the 2030 Agenda and its 17 Sustainable Development Goals, to which all members remain committed today.

These major UN bodies have become stronger and smarter, due to the support provided by the G20.Uniquely among the plurilateral summit institutions of global relevance and reach, the IMF and World Bank have participated in the G20 mechanism as invited guests from the start. And an expanding array of functional bodies are involved in Osaka, including the ILO and WHO.While the UN secretary-general has participated in every G20 summit.

The G20 has also brokered successive reforms of the quota shares and executive board members of the IMF and World Bank. And amid the global financial crisis of 2008-09, it raised $1.1 billion at its second summit, including an unprecedented increase in the IMF's Special Drawing Rights. In 2012 it added a $500 million firewall fund that helped stop a new European financial crisis. Most recently, it secured an agreement, from the US administration and others, to raise resources for the World Bank and reform how it spends that money and pays its staff.

The G20 has also created new multilateral organizations to meet the needs of an intensely interconnected 21st-century world, vastly different from 75 years ago. These include the Financial Stability Board in 2009 and the Global Infrastructure Hub in 2014. It has also mobilized the resources of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development to serve as the analytic secretariat for a G20 acting across an ever broader range of subjects.

Overall, at their first summit in 2008, G20 leaders made 39 references to different multilateral organizations. At Hamburg in 2017, they made 307 references to 19 of them.

The G20 contribution to multilateralism is likely to continue at the G20's Osaka Summit in many expanding ways, as the agenda aims to fill the gaps created by the growing demands of an increasingly complex interconnected world.

First, it is expected to launch Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe's signature initiative of the Osaka Track for digital free flow with trust, under the umbrella of - but not held hostage to - WTO processes.

Second, it will also likely approve principles for quality infrastructure investment, highlighting the governance goals of transparency and openness. These will guide the work of the World Bank and its partners in the regional development banks, including the BRICS New Development Bank and the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank.

Third, it is set to accept principles for debt transparency and sustainability, so poor countries will not borrow too much, go bankrupt and ask for a bailout from an IMF busy with its biggest loan ever - to Argentina.

Fourth, it could help WHO and the UN deliver SDG 3.8 on universal health coverage by affirming that it is a cause of development and should be introduced quickly, using domestic resources above all.

Fifth, it can create a new international framework and perhaps an eventual UN organization to reduce plastic and other waste in the oceans.

Sixth, it aims to revolutionize international taxation, by allowing countries to get their fair share of the profits that enterprises make from customers or users in their own country.

Still much remains to be done after the Osaka summit ends.

The biggest challenge is to control the climate crisis, through much bigger, bolder and faster actions than are built into the Paris Agreement and the UNFCCC.

The second is to guarantee WHO the money it needs to stop the second international Ebola epidemic unfolding now, help deliver united healthcare for all and control noncommunicable diseases.

The third is to make gender equality a reality, not just for women in the workplace but also at home and everywhere.

The fourth is to peacefully stop nuclear proliferation in the Democratic People's Republic of Korea and Iran.

It is thus good that the G20's Osaka Summit is the start of a sequence of several summertime summits, building momentum for the G7 summit in Biarritz, France, in August, and the four UN summits in New York before September ends.

The author is director of the G20 Research Group based at the University of Toronto, where he is a professor of Political Science.

The author contributed this article to China Watch exclusively. The views expressed do not necessarily reflect those of China Watch.

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