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Greek Prime Minister George Papandreou arrives for a G20 summit in Cannes, France on Wednesday, Nov. 2, 2011.Michel Euler

With the Cannes G20 summit under way this week, one wonders what has happened to the global governance initiative that was so prominent in managing the financial and economic crisis from 2008 to 2010.

The world's attention has been focused on Europe as its leaders have wrestled, slowly and ineffectively, with the region's sovereign-debt crisis. Their failure to act decisively has undermined confidence in markets around the world and threatens the global economy. Yet, to many observers, the G20 has been "missing in action."

At Cannes, it will have no choice but to engage. While European leaders have at last seemingly found their nerve and put in place some serious measures to treat the problem, they will have to convince their summit colleagues (and the markets) that these steps will be adequate to deal with the sovereign-debt issue and its long-term effects. Greek Prime Minister George Papandreou's sudden decision to risk the long-awaited breakthrough by holding a referendum on his country's part of the package raises the ante even higher.

The U.S. political system's inability to come up with a medium-term debt reduction plan while still stimulating its faltering economy in the short term will also be on the minds of G20 leaders.

There is another issue at stake in Cannes: the credibility of the G20 itself.

In the past year, the G20 has been almost invisible in the public eye. Despite the dire circumstances, there have been no G20 interventions of significance, no messages from G20 leaders as a group. In September, Prime Minister Stephen Harper and the leaders of five other countries (Indonesia, South Korea, Australia, Mexico and Britain) wrote to French President Nicolas Sarkozy, this year's summit chair, to try to energize the G20 and bring some group pressure to bear on Europe. But that was about it.

This is not the profile one would expect from the G20, whose leaders enthusiastically hailed the group as the "principal forum" for their economic co-operation just two years ago in Pittsburgh.

This apparent lack of effective engagement stands in marked contrast to the way in which the G20, freshly minted at summit level, aggressively tackled the crisis from late 2008 to November of 2010, under U.S., British, Canadian and South Korean chairs.

The absence of a scheduled summit in mid-2011 has been one reason for the relative silence. (It was decided in Pittsburgh two years ago that, with the worst of the crisis apparently over, annual summits would suffice after 2010.)

Another reason is that the man in charge of this year's summit, Mr. Sarkozy, has been caught up in the European situation and preoccupied with his struggle to position himself for re-election in 2012.

In Cannes, therefore, leaders will need to refurbish the G20's credibility through a collective set of actions and messages that deal with the global economic issues of sovereign debt and faltering growth.

This means sticking to the core agenda of putting the global economy back on its feet. It also means delivering on commitments from past summits – in particular, promised reforms on financial regulation, where Canada has been such a significant leader.

It means following up on the agreements from Pittsburgh, Toronto and Seoul – agreements that a less self-interested approach to national economic policymaking is needed by all G20 countries so as to achieve a new model of strong, sustainable and balanced global growth. This is needed more than ever.

In time, the agenda must grow and broaden, but now is not that time. There is more important work to be done.

The G20 represents the future of global economic governance. It provides emerging countries, led by the powerhouses of China, India and Brazil, with the opportunity to engage advanced economies and each other to create a new compact around effective governance and international economic behaviour. It gives advanced countries a way to share responsibility for the direction of the global economy.

At Cannes, the G20 must be seen to be putting this new governance model to work, successfully.

That is the challenge. It is time for the G20 to step up.

Len Edwards is a former deputy foreign affairs minister who was G20 "sherpa" to Canada's Prime Minister from 2008 to 2010. He is now a strategic adviser to Gowling Lafleur Henderson LLP.

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