The term sous-sherpa denotes the senior official who serves as principal deputy to a head of state or government's sherpa in the preparation of multilateral summits, most prominently those of the Group of Seven (G7) and Group of Twenty (G20). The nomenclature is borrowed from Himalayan mountaineering: just as a sherpa guides a climber to the summit, the diplomatic sherpa shepherds the leader to a successful meeting, and the sous-sherpa ("under-sherpa" in French) carries the heavier portion of the load on the ascent. The position has no treaty basis—G7 and G20 processes are informal, lacking a founding charter—but is institutionalised through host-country practice dating from the Rambouillet summit of 1975 and consolidated after the G20 was elevated to leaders' level in 2008 at Washington. Each member delegation appoints its own sherpa team according to domestic administrative arrangements; in most capitals the sous-sherpa role is split between a finance track and a foreign-affairs/development track.
Procedurally, the sous-sherpa is the working-level negotiator who drafts and re-drafts the leaders' communiqué paragraph by paragraph in the months preceding a summit. The cycle begins shortly after the previous summit closes, when the incoming presidency circulates a "scoping" or "elements" paper identifying priority deliverables. Sous-sherpas convene in a sequence of four to six in-person meetings, typically rotating through cities of the host country, supplemented by secure videoconferences and bilateral phone calls. At each session they negotiate the communiqué text in square-bracketed form, escalating only the most politically sensitive disagreements—on climate finance language, sanctions wording, or references to specific conflicts—to the sherpas themselves, and ultimately to leaders. The sous-sherpa also coordinates with working group chairs managing the dozens of parallel ministerial and expert tracks (health, digital economy, anti-corruption, employment) whose conclusions feed into the leaders' document.
Beyond text negotiation, the sous-sherpa manages the substantive interface with engagement groups—Business 20 (B20), Civil 20 (C20), Think 20 (T20), Women 20 (W20), Labour 20 (L20), and Youth 20 (Y20) in the G20 context—receiving their policy recommendations and signalling which proposals stand a realistic chance of leaders' endorsement. The role demands fluency across the full agenda: macroeconomic coordination handled by the finance track under the deputy finance ministers and central bank deputies, and the sherpa track's broader portfolio covering trade, climate, global health, and geopolitical statements. In federal systems such as Germany or Canada, the sous-sherpa often holds the rank of Director-General or Assistant Deputy Minister; in the French system the position has historically sat within the Élysée's diplomatic cell or the Secrétariat général des affaires européennes.
Contemporary practice illustrates the role's weight. During Italy's 2024 G7 presidency, sous-sherpas met repeatedly at Palazzo Chigi and in Fasano to negotiate the loan-for-Ukraine mechanism backed by immobilised Russian sovereign assets. India's 2023 G20 presidency, led by Sherpa Amitabh Kant, relied on a sous-sherpa cadre drawn from the Ministry of External Affairs and NITI Aayog to bridge the gap between Western members and the Russian and Chinese delegations on the Ukraine paragraphs of the New Delhi Leaders' Declaration adopted 9 September 2023. In the United States, the sous-sherpa function is performed by the Senior Director for International Economics at the National Security Council in tandem with a State Department deputy assistant secretary; in the United Kingdom, by an FCDO director reporting to the Prime Minister's G7/G20 Sherpa at 10 Downing Street.
The sous-sherpa should be distinguished from the sherpa proper, who attends leaders' retreats and exercises political authority to close deals, and from the finance deputy (the G20 Finance Deputies and Central Bank Deputies), who operates a parallel track culminating in finance ministers' communiqués rather than leaders' declarations. The sous-sherpa is also distinct from the political director function in EU and NATO contexts, which addresses standing institutional agendas rather than rotating summit deliverables. Within BRICS, the analogous role is termed simply "sous-sherpa" in francophone usage but more often "deputy sherpa" in working English.
Controversies surrounding the position have grown as summit communiqués have lengthened—the 2023 New Delhi declaration ran to 83 paragraphs—and as consensus has become harder to manufacture amid the Russia-Ukraine war and US-China strategic competition. Critics within the diplomatic academy argue that the sous-sherpa process has become an exercise in lowest-common-denominator drafting, with substantive commitments diluted through successive rounds of bracket-clearing. The 2022 Bali summit under Indonesia's presidency required extraordinary sous-sherpa shuttle diplomacy after the missile incident in Przewodów, Poland, on 15 November 2022 threatened to derail the declaration. The role has also been criticised for opacity: unlike treaty negotiations, sous-sherpa drafts are not published, and accountability to legislatures is limited.
For the working practitioner, understanding the sous-sherpa channel is indispensable. Embassy political counsellors in the host capital are expected to maintain regular contact with the host's sous-sherpa team to flag national sensitivities before they harden into red lines. Think-tank researchers seeking to influence summit outcomes must engage the T20 process at least nine months before the summit date to reach sous-sherpas during the formative drafting window. Journalists covering summitry will find that sous-sherpas, while rarely on the record, are the authoritative readout source on what was actually contested in the communiqué—knowledge that shapes the post-summit interpretive battle.
Example
During India's 2023 G20 presidency, sous-sherpas convened in Hampi, Kumarakom, and Nuh to negotiate the bracketed Ukraine paragraphs that became the New Delhi Leaders' Declaration adopted on 9 September 2023.