Will the G-20 have teeth?

World leaders have begun trickling in to the Pittsburgh Airport, and the media center at the convention center downtown – which is in complete lockdown mode, with traffic banished and police everywhere -- has begun filling up. There hasn’t been this much international diplomatic excitement in town since Nikita Kruschev visited Pittsburgh 50 years ago today.

But there’s not going to be much action yet at the G-20 summit -- or at least not until early evening, when Barack Obama hosts what’s being billed as a “working dinner” at the Phipps Conservatory in Schenley Park, 2 1/2 miles from here. The president is due to arrive later this afternoon from New York.

Various do-gooder NGOs, including the World Wildlife Fund, the US Climate Action Network, and the Union of Concerned Scientists, have set up shop in the August Wilson Center a few blocks away, and are making themselves available to discuss their priorities, from climate change to poverty.

Unlike at the U.N. General Assembly, which is a huge public circus, nearly all of the action here happens behind closed doors, and then the leaders issue a communiqué at the end explaining what they are prepared to do next. In the November 2008 summit in Washington, for instance, the G-20 put out an action plan to coordinate reform efforts and bolster the International Monetary Fund’s ability to respond to what at the time was a blinking-red, throw-momma-from-the-train global financial crisis.

This week, the focus is no longer on crisis management but on putting in place the structural reforms that advocates say can prevent the next meltdown. We’ll see if anything with teeth comes out of this meeting -- Nicolas Sarkozy is beating the drums for changes in banker pay, while Obama and his Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner are pushing for tighter capital requirements, Germany is obsessed with cracking down on tax havens, and the Canadians are trying to beat back a protectionist wave -- but we can expect the usual watered-down, lowest-common-denominator stuff to emerge at a minimum.

I’ll be interested to see if Geithner’s ideas for reforming the IMF gain any traction. The micro story is a technocratic one, but the macro story could be yet another sign that China is being welcomed into the inner circles of global power. The scuttlebutt is that the Treasury secretary hopes to persuade China to sign on to his priorities on capital requirements and other reforms in exchange for getting a larger share of control of the fund. Anyone know the Chinese word for “bribery”?