BRICS Plus Format

The BRICS Plus format originated as a Chinese diplomatic initiative during China's 2017 chairmanship of the grouping, formally introduced at the Xiamen Summit held from 3 to 5 September 2017. BRICS itself emerged from the acronym coined by Goldman Sachs economist Jim O'Neill in 2001, was institutionalised as a political grouping with the first leaders' summit at Yekaterinburg in June 2009 (then "BRIC"), and added South Africa at the end of 2010 to become BRICS. The Plus format has no founding treaty, charter, or secretariat; it rests entirely on consensus among the member states and the discretionary prerogatives of the annual rotating chair. Its legal character is therefore that of a political modality rather than an institution with juridical personality — a distinction that shapes everything about how invitations are extended, who attends, and what commitments, if any, the invited parties incur.

Procedurally, the BRICS Plus format operates through the chair's discretion exercised within the bounds of member consensus. The state holding the annual rotating chairmanship — determined alphabetically and confirmed at the preceding summit — drafts a guest list of non-member countries and regional organisations, circulates it through the BRICS sherpa track, and secures the agreement of the other members before issuing invitations. The sherpas and sous-sherpas, senior officials designated by each foreign ministry, conduct the year-round preparatory negotiations that culminate in the leaders' summit. Invited leaders typically join a dedicated outreach session appended to the formal summit, distinct from the closed-door deliberations reserved for full members, where they exchange views on development, trade, and global governance reform without participating in the drafting of the summit declaration.

The format admits two recurring variants that practitioners should distinguish. The first is the "BRICS Plus" dialogue proper, in which a curated set of countries — often chosen to reflect the host's diplomatic priorities — is invited to a structured session. The second is the "BRICS Outreach" tradition, which predates the Plus label and tends to invite the leaders of the host region's neighbourhood; South Africa, for instance, has repeatedly convened African heads of state under the rubric of BRICS-Africa outreach. China's 2017 innovation grafted a "Plus" logic of emerging-market and developing-country inclusion onto the older outreach practice, and subsequent chairs have blended the two according to their own foreign-policy emphases. Neither variant confers voting rights, financial obligations under the New Development Bank, or access to the Contingent Reserve Arrangement.

Contemporary practice illustrates the format's elasticity. Russia, chairing in 2024, convened the Kazan Summit from 22 to 24 October 2024 and staged an expansive "BRICS Plus/Outreach" session that drew leaders and representatives from across the Global South, framing it through the Kazan Declaration's language on a more representative multipolar order. This followed the watershed Johannesburg Summit of August 2023, where South Africa's chairmanship presided over the decision to admit new full members — Egypt, Ethiopia, Iran, and the United Arab Emirates joined effective 1 January 2024, with Saudi Arabia invited and Indonesia subsequently admitted in early 2025. The Plus format thus functioned as the antechamber through which several of these states first engaged the grouping before accession, demonstrating its role as a pipeline as well as a dialogue.

It is essential to distinguish the BRICS Plus format from full BRICS membership and from the separate category of partner countries introduced at Kazan in 2024. Full members participate in summit declarations, govern the New Development Bank and the Contingent Reserve Arrangement, and bear the grouping's collective commitments. Partner countries occupy an intermediate, named status with structured engagement short of membership. BRICS Plus, by contrast, is a summit-day modality of invitation that creates no standing status whatsoever — a state invited to a Plus session in one year has no entitlement to attend the next. The format is also distinct from observer arrangements at bodies such as the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation, which are codified in that organisation's charter; BRICS Plus participation is purely ad hoc.

Controversy attends the format on two fronts. First, the absence of objective accession criteria has generated friction among members: India and Brazil have favoured a measured, consensus-driven pace of expansion, wary of dilution and of the grouping tilting toward a Sino-Russian agenda, whereas China and Russia have pressed for broader enlargement to amplify the coalition's weight against Western-led institutions. The Plus format became the negotiating space in which these tensions played out before the 2023 expansion decision. Second, critics question the coherence of a grouping that spans rival states — the inclusion of regional competitors raises doubts about whether enlarged outreach strengthens collective bargaining or fragments it. The 2025 admission of Indonesia and the proliferation of partner states have intensified these debates.

For the working practitioner, the BRICS Plus format is the principal instrument through which the grouping projects itself as a convenor of the Global South and tests prospective members before formal accession. Desk officers tracking emerging multilateralism should read invitation lists as signals of the chair's diplomatic priorities and of shifting alignments within the developing world. For the Indian civil-services aspirant addressing GS Paper II, the format exemplifies how informal, consensus-based groupings extend influence without institutional commitment, and how India calibrates its participation to balance South-South solidarity against strategic autonomy and its concerns over Chinese dominance of the agenda.