Evaluate the challenges and opportunities in achieving consensus among an expanded BRICS membership on global governance reform.

BRICS, which began as a four-nation economic grouping in 2009, has expanded since 2024 to include Egypt, Ethiopia, Iran, the UAE and Indonesia, and the 18th Summit at New Delhi (12–13 September 2026) adopted the New Delhi Declaration under the theme "Building for Resilience, Innovation, Cooperation and Sustainability" [1]. Enlargement has widened BRICS' representative weight, but consensus on reforming global governance remains a demanding, not automatic, gain.

Opportunities created by expansion

• Enhanced legitimacy as the voice of the Global South: a membership spanning Asia, Africa, West Asia and Latin America lets BRICS press credibly for the Global South to become a rule-shaper, not a rule-taker [1].
• Reform agenda with momentum: India's proposal for a set of concrete global governance reform proposals, to mature into a roadmap by the next summit, converts rhetoric into a negotiating text [1].
• Institutional capacity: the New Development Bank and local-currency settlement mechanisms give BRICS working alternatives, strengthening its bargaining leverage on IMF quota and UNSC reform.
• Process depth: over 350 meetings across Indian cities during India's 2026 Chairship built habits of technical-level consensus below the leaders' level [2].

Challenges to consensus

• Divergent national interests: China and Russia often seek an overtly counter-Western bloc, while India, Brazil and the UAE pursue multi-alignment, limiting shared positions.
• Intra-group rivalries: unresolved India–China boundary issues and West Asian fault lines dilute common language, as the protracted negotiation over conflict-related paragraphs in the Delhi Declaration showed [1].
• Unanimity costs: a larger table raises transaction costs and pushes outcomes toward lowest-common-denominator wording.
• Competing reform claims: several members individually aspire to UNSC permanent seats, complicating a single BRICS demand.

On balance, expansion has strengthened BRICS' moral and demographic claim to reform global institutions more than its capacity to act as one. The realistic way forward is issue-based convergence — trade, finance, climate finance and counter-terrorism — institutionalised through the reform roadmap, so that BRICS steadily converts representational legitimacy into an inclusive, rules-based multilateral order.