BRICS 2026: The Geopolitics of Consensus

The 18th BRICS Summit, held in New Delhi on September 12-13, 2026, marked the fourth time India chaired the grouping and the first since its expansion. At a moment of acute geopolitical polarisation, the summit brought together a diverse set of world leaders, including from nations in conflict. PM Modi also held 15 formal bilateral meetings over three days, reflecting India’s effort to strengthen BRICS as a platform for cooperation as well as individual partnerships. 

A strong measure of the summit’s success was the adoption by consensus of the New Delhi Declaration. The language was carefully calibrated, showcasing multilateralism at work: explicit positions where interests converged, ambiguity where they did not, and setting aside issues where differences were difficult to bridge. 

India’s main diplomatic challenge was to enhance the relevance of BRICS without making it ideologically divisive. That balance ran through the summit: reform of global governance, but not rejection of the existing international order; greater use of local currencies and financial connectivity, but no common BRICS currency; a stronger Global South voice, but no attempt to turn BRICS into a new geopolitical camp. India sought to keep the grouping reformist rather than revisionist, while leaving enough strategic space for diversity of opinion among its members. 

The substantive emphasis was on practical cooperation and outcomes that could eventually be felt beyond summit declarations. Trade and economic cooperation acquired greater structure through work on customs, logistics and value chains. Innovation and digital cooperation expanded into newer areas, such as startups and  agriculture. BRICS pushed further along questions of economic resilience, including energy systems, public-health preparedness and AI. While there was no dramatic breakthrough, this indicated where an enlarged BRICS may find its broadest common ground: practical cooperation around shared economic and developmental interests. 

This expanding agenda, however, also heralds a new challenge. BRICS now has more members, more ministerial tracks, more meetings and more initiatives. It risks becoming very busy without becoming correspondingly effective. The proposal by PM Modi for a BRICS Continuity and Implementation Mechanism under the Troika directly addressed this ‘weakness’ by seeking a more systematic way to track decisions, timelines and responsibility. The Declaration acknowledged the need for continuity and stronger coordination and welcomed progress on an archival database, but stopped short of adopting the specific mechanism. The principle survived; the institutional answer remains unfinished. 

BRICS 2026 indicated that eleven very different countries can still reach agreement when there is sufficient political investment in diplomacy and practical cooperation. But, as the author observes, consensus is only the first test. The harder task is whether successive presidencies can convert a growing body of initiatives into sustained results. That, more than the length of declarations or number of meetings, will determine whether an enlarged BRICS can translate its collective weight into meaningful global cooperation.

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