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The global debt architecture rests on a structural asymmetry: creditors act as a united front, while sovereign borrowers face them one by one. That front stands on three pillars. Bilateral, multilateral, and private creditors offer sovereign borrowers less favorable loan terms and conditionalities. They exercise their power through long-lasting institutions like the Paris Club and the London Club. And the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund serve the interests of the Global North more fully than those of the Global South.

Past attempts at debtor coordination show how necessary, and how fragile, collective action among sovereign borrowers is. Those lessons matter now. The recently launched Borrowers’ Platform opens a new institutional space for debtor countries to exchange experiences and build a common voice. It does not intend to be a negotiating club, but it reflects a growing recognition that the current architecture is structurally unbalanced, and that collective action has the power to change it.

Between 1984 and 1987, eleven Latin American and Caribbean governments convened in what became the Cartagena Consensus, still the most ambitious effort to build a coordination space for sovereign borrowers. The trigger was a crisis that had pushed the region’s external debt to USD 327 billion by 1982. After several meetings, a joint declaration set out common negotiating guidelines, proposed consultation and follow-up mechanisms, promoted the exchange of technical information, and opened a political dialogue with creditor governments to demand rescheduling and restructuring.

None of it crystallized. U.S. commercial banks and the U.S. government saw a debtors’ cartel in the making. Declassified CIA documents lay out Washington’s recommended response, which creditors quickly took up: grant bilateral relief to key countries and use diplomacy to break the group apart. It worked. As bilateral deals fragmented the debtors, the creditors consolidated. Banks created advisory committees that outlived the negotiations and were later used to set terms for syndicated loans, share strategies, and coordinate sanctions.

Three lessons stand out.

First, short-term relief tends to crowd out long-term transformation. Governments under pressure take the bilateral deal on the table. Collective action on debt can hold only if countries work out, in advance, a support strategy strong enough to offset the costs of creditor retaliation. That strategy must also be tied to structural transformation in food sovereignty, energy sovereignty, and industrial policy, so that debt relief does not simply recreate the deficits that generated the debt in the first place.

Second, debtors are up against what the historian Edward Jones Corredera, in his book Odious Debt, calls the “moral economy of debt,” in which repayment stops being a question of risk management, where default is one possible outcome among others, and becomes a matter of national honor and moral discipline. Under that logic, countries are expected to put debt service ahead of social policy and transformative investment.

Third, political declarations need institutions behind them. Commitment at the top is essential, but it must be followed by concrete and sustained decisions. Bohoslavsky and Cantamutto argue that binding commitments and formal consultation and follow-up mechanisms can keep exchange and mutual interest alive across political transitions. Transparency, accountability, and the participation of civil society and independent experts help sustain such initiatives against creditor pressure and political upheaval, and supply data, ideas, and strategies. Embedding coordination in broader regional integration can also align political leadership with long-term development goals rather than the short-term, fragmented commitments that have weakened these efforts before.

Global South leaders kept raising borrower coordination in international forums. In the 1990s and 2000s, a series of short-lived spaces emerged: the Heavily Indebted Poor Countries (HIPC) Finance Ministers Network, the Commonwealth HIPC Ministers Forum, the Organisation Internationale de la Francophonie (OIF), and the Low-Income Developing Countries Finance Ministers Network. They built joint positions on financial architecture reform and debt restructuring, and the HIPC and OIF networks became useful places to share experience on securing better relief. None became a lasting coalition. The Committee of 10, created in 2008 so African finance ministers and central bank governors could forge a unified response to the global financial crisis, lacked sustained leadership and binding mechanisms and went dormant after 2014.

In 2020, Ethiopian Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed, Senegalese President Macky Sall, and South African President Cyril Ramaphosa jointly warned of default risk and took their case for debt deferral to the G20. The response, the Debt Service Suspension Initiative, paused payments to official bilateral creditors from May 2020 to the end of 2021. It also defused the pressure for further joint action, while leaving major private and multilateral creditors out altogether.

The most recent attempt came from the Organization of Southern Cooperation (OSC), a small intergovernmental body founded in 2020 to promote education, with mostly African members alongside a few from Latin America, the Caribbean, Asia, the Middle East, and the Pacific Islands. The OSC designed a Common Leveraging Union of Borrowers (CLUB) to share strategies, pool capacities and resources, and negotiate collectively for lower debt burdens and better financing. Its by-laws were approved in November 2023, but the CLUB never took off, and the OSC ceased operations in June 2026 after running into financial difficulties.

The pattern echoes Cartagena. Borrower coordination tends to be reactive, hostage to shifting political interests, and quickly undercut by creditors. It relies too heavily on individual leaders and too little on institutions that can survive political transitions. And the policy influence of the IMF and World Bank over domestic decision-makers and bureaucracies has further narrowed the space for autonomous debt negotiation.

Beyond debt, though not unrelated to it, Southern collective action has produced tangible results. The Eastern Caribbean Drug Service, operating since 1986 and now the OECS Pharmaceutical Procurement Service, pools the purchasing power of nine Caribbean health ministries. It has cut medicine prices by roughly 20 percent, saving participating governments an average of USD 4 million a year. The Fossil Fuel Non-Proliferation Treaty Initiative brings eighteen countries together on joint positions on fossil fuel dependency and the ecological transition. These experiences show that coordination in the Global South is urgent, possible, and worth planning ahead, across debt, procurement, energy, and industrial policy.