This year’s G20 presidency has shifted to South Africa, under which sovereign debt will be a key priority. South Africa is pushing for a review of the G20’s Common Framework (CF) for debt treatments, five years since its creation during the Covid-19 crisis in 2020. It was part of broader G20 debt relief efforts to alleviate the economic impacts of the pandemic, but also to bring to the table both official creditors and commercial creditors and bondholders for the first time to work in tandem. The CF has delivered substantive debt relief – as we show below – but these restructurings illustrate the significant challenges in how contemporary restructurings for low and middle-income countries work: that they are too little, too late and too complex. […]