For more than 15 years, CIGI has stood at the heart of a seismic transformation in global governance: the rise of think tanks as genuine partners to the world’s most powerful fora. What began as a single working group ahead of a G20 summit in Seoul, South Korea has grown into an enduring architecture of influence, one that helped shape the agendas of G20 and G7 leaders and, in 2025, brought the Think7 (T7) Summit itself to CIGI’s own campus. CIGI reshaped the channels through which think tanks and governance interact and built a new dimension for trusted analysis to achieve its desired impacts.
In the lead-up to the fifth G20 summit in Seoul in November 2010, with the world’s nations still reeling from the 2008 financial crisis and seeking a forward-thinking strategy, a need was emerging for independent research and critical policy dialogue to inform global leaders’ responses to challenges facing the global economy. CIGI’s G20 Working Group stepped into this gap, offering future-focused analysis and expert perspective at a time when the G20 process itself was still finding its footing. That early working group laid the groundwork for an even more ambitious endeavour: It evolved into the Think20 (T20), the network of think tanks that now advises the G20 every year, and CIGI is recognized as a founding member, with its working group serving as one of the initiative’s cornerstones.
Prior even to the establishment of the official G20 Working Group, CIGI was working to redefine the expectations global leaders had for insights and recommendations from think tanks through its involvement in the G20 and the G8 (later the G7), and through critical meta-analysis of the global summits. CIGI was instrumental in the creation of the G20 Leaders’ Summit, which elevated the G20 finance ministers’ meetings to the leaders’ level. CIGI experts’ critical insights for the G20 process provided the perspective CIGI needed to make an impact as it proceeded with its T20 initiatives and their evolutions.
The impact of CIGI’s initiative with the T20 was quickly felt. In June 2012, at the G20 summit in Los Cabos, Mexico, the cooperative group CIGI had helped build was singled out on the world stage. As CIGI’s 2012 Annual Report recorded, “the summit’s final declaration agreed to by all G20 nations included specific praise for the Think20 initiative, a CIGI-led collaboration of G20 think tanks.” It was a rare formal acknowledgment from the leaders of the world’s largest economies of the concrete value that independent policy research could bring to their proceedings.
From that foundation, the model matured and multiplied. The T20 gave rise to the T7, the G7’s official engagement group, built to bring evidence-based advice and tailored policy recommendations to the G7 presidency each year. That evolution reached a milestone in 2025, when CIGI hosted the T7 Summit at its own campus, welcoming task force members into private discussion spaces to workshop their official recommendations, and opening hybrid panels to the public. It had come full circle: CIGI was spearheading the process, convening leading thinkers for the T7 Summit just as it had when it organized the first G20 Working Group for Seoul in 2010.
The influence of the 2025 T7 Summit is still working its way through global policy. The T7 task forces (Transformative Technologies — AI and Quantum; Digitalization of the Global Economy; Environment, Energy and Sustainable Development; and Global Peace and Security) fed directly into the priorities Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney laid out for the G7: protecting communities through stronger peace and security and building energy security while accelerating the digital transition. It is a throughline that stretches back more than 15 years, from a modest working group ahead of Seoul, through a public commendation at Los Cabos, to a G7 leader’s stated priorities in 2025 — proof that CIGI’s commitment to independent, evidence-based analysis has not just distantly observed global governance, but has helped set its course.