On 6 December, The Centre for International Governance Innovation (CIGI) hosted the official handover of the Think7 (T7) coordination from Italy to Canada. Prof. Dr Anna-Katharina Hornidge contributed to the event as a panellist delivering remarks on “Technology at the centre of government challenges”.
T7 Family Photo, copyright: CIGI
The virtual event brought together speakers from the international think tank community, academic networks, government representatives, as well as national G7 teams, to reflect on achievements and lessons learned from Italy’s T7 presidency and look ahead to Canada’s T7 presidency.
The event opened with Antonio Villafranca, Vice President for Research at Istituto per gli Studi di Politica Internazionale (ISPI) and Ettore Greco, Executive Vice President at Instituto Affari Internazionali (IAI), who gave an overview of how T7 proposals shaped the G7 process in 2024. These contributions where then taken up by Tommaso Murè, Italy’s G7/G20 Assistant Sherpa, Presidency of the Council of Ministers, who thanked the T7 members for their evidence-based advice and important contributions to the G7 process. With this, the official handover from Italy to Canada was marked. The event then opened up discussion on the T7’s role and priorities with three panel discussions on “Think7 role in global cooperation”, “Technology at the centre of governance challenges” and “Looking to next year – 2025”, with brief contributions from each panellist.
As part of the second panel, introduced by Tracey Forrest, Research Director Transformative Technologies at CIGI, Anna-Katharina Hornidge emphasised the importance of overcoming imbalances of power and inequalities in science and technology systems, as highlighted for the first time also by the UN Pact for the Future, which stand in the way of addressing global challenges together. In this context, she put forth open science efforts as a priority for the T7 and beyond. The event closed with remarks by Martin Lajoie, Director, G7/G20 Summits Bureau, Government of Canada who emphasised the importance of T7 input to the G7 process and identified first priorities for the Canadian G7 presidency: Building economies that benefit everyone, the fight against climate change, management of rapid technology advancement and gender equality as a cross-cutting objective to be integrated across policy fields.
Participants throughout emphasised that the T7 is really to be understood as a T7 Plus, where cooperation with partners worldwide and from the Global South in particular is key.
