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Part I
Introduction
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Strategic Facilitation of Climate Change Negotiations
An Introduction
Gunnar Sjöstedt and Ariel Macaspac Penetrante
The UN negotiations on climate change remain complex and difficult, as they have been for thirty-odd years. A major inquiry addressed in this book is if, to what degree, and how obstacles confronting negotiators in the climate talks can be reduced, or perhaps even entirely eliminated, with the help of external facilitators. The focus is not only set on how to cope with diverging party interests. Primarily, the project addresses technical negotiation issues such as the framing of issues, capacity building in weak nations, institutional reform or process redesign. The key concept of the book is strategic facilitation, as seen in a long time perspective.
Objectives of the study and its design
There are many impediments to effective climate change negotiation; some are simply incidental, in the sense that they are entirely tied to a particular situation and therefore difficult to predict and prevent. One example of this would be the unexpected outcome of a national election in a key country, giving power to a new administration opposing internationally coordinated measures to reduce greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. Incidental impediments are difficult to foresee for practitioners, and also demanding to cope with in negotiation analysis.
Other negotiation obstacles than such incidental problems are of a quasi-structural nature, although they can be modified or change gradually over time. Moreover, such stumbling blocks that will have an important impact on future negotiations may already be discernible in the present. An example would be mounting shortcomings on the part of one of the organizations supporting the climate talks, say, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). In this case, institutional reform could represent a useful facilitation approach, which will have an impact only in the longer term.
The main objective of this book is to suggest and assess useful methods to facilitate the UN negotiations on climate change to consider a strategic and forward-looking perspective. This approach presupposes the discovery of principal obstacles in the climate talks – stumbling blocks – that are meaningful targets for strategic facilitation efforts for a longer period of time.
The center of attention of this study will be long-term facilitation approaches related to a continuous regime-building process, unfolding at the “macro level” above particular negotiation rounds or sessions that are integrated into the macro process by various “continuities” linking consecutive rounds. One example of such couplings is the preparatory work being carried out for the negotiations in the capitals of states that are parties to the climate negotiating process. Such groundwork for future climate talks may often develop from an evaluation of an earlier negotiation round, joining forward linkages to backward couplings.
Strategic facilitation is very different from troubleshooting in a current situation. This new facilitation concept implies that it is useful to try to plan and structure the future negotiation process in advance in such a way that at least some enduring stumbling blocks can be managed, circumvented, or even eliminated. Technically, strategic facilitation is a form of external intervention in a multilateral negotiation. It is designed by actors who are not direct parties to the climate talks, such as independent consultants, research institutes, universities, and nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), but are still believed to have a potential capacity to make the climate negotiations more effective.1 Obviously, negotiation parties such as a national government or an international secretariat can do various things to aid a negotiation, but such measures fall outside the definition of strategic facilitation used in this project. Strategic facilitation is “operationalized” as coping with stumbling blocks which represent persistent obstacles in the climate talks.
One of the motives for this project is the observation that the concept of strategic facilitation of regime-building through multilateral negotiation is not common in the literature, although it is clearly required in numerous issue areas, for example, the environment and international trade. Another reason is that the exceptionally weighty contribution by the world scientific community to the climate talks is heavily skewed in favor of natural scientists such as physicists and meteorologists. This project assumes that social scientists also are in a position to considerably increase the contribution of the international scientific community to the development of the climate negotiations towards a fruitful outcome.
Social scientists have certainly been involved in the worldwide mobilization of scientific knowledge that has taken place through the IPCC. For example, senior economists have been engaged in developing and refining economic policy measures to cope with climate warming. However, social scientists with a special focus on the processes of international negotiation have to a great extent been overlooked by the IPCC and the organizers of the recursive climate talks. Such process specialists should be given a much larger role in the planning and facilitation of the complex international negotiation on climate change. This is an argument developed and responded to in this book.
While the project is concerned with how the UN negotiations on climate warming will develop in the years to come, its general outlook is both forward- and backward-looking from point zero; here and now. The effects of the facilitation measures that will be discussed pertain to the future. The knowledge basis for the determination of facilitation approaches is founded in the past – in the progress of a regime-building process that began almost a quarter of a century ago.2 In one respect, this project can be regarded as a historical study essentially covering the period from the Copenhagen Climate Change Conference in December 2009 (COP15) for the purpose of looking forward at likely negotiation obstacles and possible facilitation strategies in future negotiations. The logic we plead is that such a systematic historical case is an instrumental point of departure for educated guesses about negotiation problems and their solutions in the future climate talks. It is better to have this point of reference in a clear near past than in a current more obscure situation.
The Copenhagen Conference has a central function in the design of this project. It is an example of how the climate negotiation unfolds at a particular time and in a particular setting. However the historical case study of the Copenhagen Conference does not only include the events that took place in the Danish capital in late November and early December 2009. The general background to and the preparations for the Copenhagen Conference are also a part of the case as well continuities from Copenhagen to consecutive large negotiation rounds in Cancun (2010) and Durban (2011).
Note that the case of the Copenhagen Conference is here regarded as but one element of a much wider understanding of the overall climate negotiation in the UN, which includes a multitude of other meetings and activities. Other types of cases pertaining to the broad understanding of the climate talks will be addressed in the project. These other cases are of a different character, as they represent important themes pertaining to the climate talk as a whole and to a specific event in this process.
The Copenhagen Climate Conference
The 2009 climate meeting had a number of special traits, some of which were simply due to its location in Denmark. All the 17 major UN conferences addressing the issue of climate change have had a special history and have brought about somewhat different end results. At the same time, the Copenhagen meeting, or any other climate conference, exhibited important similarities with the16 other climate conferences that have taken place. Therefore, it is possible to draw lessons from Copenhagen that can be expected to be relevant for other grand climate conferences in the future.
The road to Copenhagen
From its inception, the climate change negotiation process has included hundreds of meetings of various kinds, for example, ministerial meetings, professional diplomatic encounters, and workshops attended by large numbers of scientists and other experts. However, for the purposes of this project the Climate Conference in Copenhagen that took place during 7–19 December 2009 needs to be especially highlighted, for several reasons:
1. It was the first attempt to achieve a binding agreement on climate change to come into effect after the first commitment period of the Kyoto Protocol to the UNFCCC ends in December 2012.
2. Copenhagen was seen as a point of departure for the future negotiation and regime-building process, which is addressed in this project.
3. Its perceived political importance was high, as indicated by the presence in Copenhagen of more than 100 heads of state or government.
4. It created a broad awareness that the climate negotiations as a whole will need to be of long duration if they are to have a satisfactory braking effect on climate warming.
The history of international negotiation on climate change dates back to the mid-1980s. These meetings were first organized by the international scientific community and attended by policymakers and international civil servants. Informal agenda setting was eventually drawn into the United Nations system and generated the 1992 United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC).
The Convention itself contained no legally binding commitments by governments to reduce GHGs. It is a framework convention, intended to serve as a platform for continued negotiation to establish effective international regulations on GHG reductions. After five years of negotiation, regulatory instruments were indeed established under the 1997 Kyoto Protocol to the UNFCCC. By signing the Kyoto Protocol, developed countries committed themselves to decrease their atmospheric GHG emissions according to an agreed schedule of relatively modest emission reductions. The heaviest mitigation burden among industrialized countries was that of the European Union (EU) which pledged an 8 per cent average reduction – well below the 60–80 per cent reductions requested by the international scientific community.3 While not solving the problem of climate warming, the Kyoto Protocol did indicate a strategy to address it, namely, via the framework/protocol approach driven by recurrent interlinked negotiations.
The Kyoto Protocol was intended to remain in force until 2012 and to be followed and further developed by a new and more ambitious global climate agreement. Thus, shortly after its entry into force in February 2005, post-Kyoto climate talks were signalled. These negotiations began formally at the eleventh Conference of Parties (COP11) to the UNFCCC at the Climate Change Conference in Montreal in 2005, which adopted more than 40 decisions to strengthen global efforts against climate change.4 The Canadian Environment Minister described the situation as follows: “The Kyoto Protocol has been switched on, a dialogue about the future action has begun, parties have moved forward to work on adaptation and have advanced the implementation of the regular work programme of the Convention and of the Protocol.”5
The 2006 Climate Conference in Nairobi represented the second major session of the post-Kyoto talks but did not produce a breakthrough in the regime building process. Nevertheless, Nairobi focused on long term matters and action, continued the “multi-track” approach to these issues that had been established at COP11/MOP1 in Montreal, and reflected on the development of a framework for action once the Kyoto Protocol’s “first commitment period” would be finished in 2012 (IISD 2006).
More concrete results were attained at COP13 the following year. On 3–14 December 2007, more than 10,000 delegates from 180 nations, governmental and nongovernmental organizations, and global media took part in the United Nations Climate Change Conference in Bali, Indonesia, at which the thirteenth Conference of Parties (COP13) adopted the “Bali Road Map” designed to guide a two-year process toward finalization of a binding agreement in Copenhagen 2009. The Bali Road Map included an Action Plan and set up two new negotiation institutions, the Ad Hoc Working Group on Further Commitments for Annex I Parties under the Kyoto Protocol (AWG-KP) negotiations and the Ad Hoc Working Group on Long-Term Cooperative Action under the Framework Convention (AWG-LCA).6
The first comprehensive round of negotiations framed by the Bali Road Map took place in Bangkok in March 2008. This meeting further specified the work program for post-Kyoto talks, focusing on the five main components of the agenda: adaptation to climate warming, mitigation of emissions of greenhouse gases, technology, finance, and the vision for long-term international cooperative action in the climate area.
In 2008 the fourteenth Conference of Parties (COP14) met at the UN Climate Conference in Poznan, Poland (1–12 December). The COP welcomed the progress made with respect to the Bali Action Plan.7 Similarly noted was the determination of negotiating parties “to shift into full negotiating mode in 2009” and an invitation was made to all Parties to put forward further proposals regarding the content and form of the des...
