Institutionalizing International Forums: The Increasing Role of G7 and G20 Engagement Groups

International Relations scholarship has long treated the G7 and G20 as arenas of executive bargaining, while paying far less attention to the societal actors operating around them. This article shifts the focus to the summits’ Engagement Groups (EGs) and asks whether these actors merely provide symbolic participation or actually shape summit outcomes. Using computer-assisted textual analysis, the paper systematically compares EG communiqués with final summit declarations in order to trace how societal demands travel into the language of global summitry. The findings show that EG influence is far from marginal. In numerous cases, summit declarations reproduce recommendations from EG statements directly, sometimes nearly verbatim. Business groups (B7/B20) are particularly successful in shaping language on trade, investment, and digital governance, while Labour, Civil Society, Women, Youth, and Parliamentary groups achieve more selective uptake. Over time, the incorporation of EG demands has intensified, culminating in cases such as the 2023 Delhi G20 Summit, where passages from the P20 communiqué appeared almost unchanged in the final declaration. The article argues that these developments point to a growing institutionalisation of societal participation within informal international organisations. At the same time, they raise broader questions about representation, co-optation, and whose voices ultimately become embedded in global governance.