Negotiating the
Future of the Planet COP-15 – why did it fail?
By Olga Gassan-Zade W
hen the Copenhagen conference ended, it appeared that the summit had failed catastrophically. After all, the plenary failed to adopt a document put
in front of it by world leaders who represented over 4 billion people and all major groupings among the negotiating countries – much to the dismay of the hosts and majority of the negotiators. Indeed, only five countries objected to the adoption of the Copenhagen Accord. The representative of the Bahamas summed up the
frustration felt by many in the developing world when he said “I don’t understand why the President of Maldives has to beg for anyone’s attention, to beg to take the document which is the result of the work of heads of governments, and to beg for it to be treated as anything else other than a miscellaneous document. I find it totally unacceptable”. The representative of Saudi Arabia was similarly baffled by the
failure to agree on a legally-binding document: “The reactions to this text are incredible ... It is as if we are actually adopting here a legally binding agreement. If this is how they are looking at text that just takes us from one level of negotiation to another level of negotiation, I really don’t see any time in the near future where … we will reach a point where we can actually adopt an agreement”. To understand why the events unfolded
tracks, more texts started appearing, culminated in frantic attempts by the leaders to agree to some kind of a text while the main negotiations were stalled. The impression on the ground was that the Danish Presidency
was trying to by-pass the formal negotiations in an attempt to avoid some of the difficult stumbling blocks in the main texts. That there were attempts to break the impasse is nothing out of the ordinary, but the heavy-handedness of the Danish Presidency caused mistrust on the negotiating floor. Many of the developing countries felt steamrollered and resentment brewed for the whole two weeks of the conference. The virtue of sticking to procedure is that it protects the process
from being hijacked and this is exactly where Copenhagen failed. In the hope that a political agreement would supersede the formal process, focus was switched entirely from the negotiators onto the world’s leaders. Yet having so many world leaders turned out to be both the biggest strength and the biggest weakness of the Copenhagen summit. It backfired in three ways. Firstly, everybody was waiting for the proverbial 11th
hour for the decisions to be made. Yet, The sin of parallel
the way they did we need to rewind back to the beginning of the two weeks in Copenhagen. As soon as the negotiations started a text was leaked to the media (the infamous Danish text) proposing a draft of a new agreement. For the vast majority of the negotiators on the ground it was a complete surprise; it came out of nowhere and those who participated in its drafting did not wish to be identified. Most importantly, the Danish text and its subsequent versions put in question the work of the formal drafting groups that were still having meetings and negotiating texts that the leaked draft was to replace. In the normal course of events the negotiations are carefully
negotiations is the gravest one in the UNFCCC process
when the eleventh hour arrived, not even a preliminary text was ready to be forwarded to the leaders for them to decide on concrete options, which was the usual modus operandi for high-level segments in the past. As President Lula of Brazil said during the Danish Presidency’s high level event , the negotiators had not done their work, it
on December 18th
orchestrated to canvass the opinions of all groups and get an agreement before the deal is announced. Even the process itself has to be agreed. The sin of parallel negotiations is the gravest one in the UNFCCC process and it is not forgiven lightly. In Bali, a slight miscalculation by the Indonesian presidency and the UNFCCC Secretariat almost led to the collapse of the talks, forcing a tear and a formal apology from the then UNFCCC Executive Secretary Yvo de Boer. In Copenhagen it felt as if the sin of parallel negotiations
had become the norm. First, the Danish texts were leaked to the press, then, when developing country negotiators decried alternative processes and tried to put the process back to two
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was not the job of the leaders to be drafting the text. Secondly, the leaders were unfamiliar with, and unaccustomed to, the UNFCCC process, resulting in them disregarding it completely when the time came to making political decisions. Thirdly, when the Danish Prime Minister invited other heads of state to come to the Copenhagen summit, he had to invite all of them. As a result, along with people who came to negotiate the new climate regime came those who showed up because the others showed up too. The combination of so many leaders with such diverse
agendas and a lack of an established diplomatic protocol resulted in inevitable confusion. When the leaders arrived, the Danish Presidency put together a group of 25 leaders that were to work on the text. Normally, such a process, called ‘Friends of the Chair’ would not be controversial as long as it was mandated by the negotiating parties. In Copenhagen the negotiators did not give the Presidency the mandate to create such a group, as some of them demanded that any decision affecting billions of people should not be made behind closed doors. Furthermore, while negotiators in general accept the necessity of negotiating
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