What type of negotiator are you?
Posted on 08. Jun, 2010 by annac in United Kingdom
I hope our negotiators didn't choose their specialism from a magazine quiz...
Last week I told you about how many new faces there are around these negotiations, with quite a few of them to be found in the UK negotiating team. I said that I thought that this wasn’t necessarily a bad thing, new life, new solutions.
However some of you may be thinking, yes but this is a complicated and difficult process, how can these new people help us sort it out when they can’t even be up to speed yet?
Well don’t fear because as many new people as there are here, we still have some old hands too. And at this session in Bonn the UK old hands have really been driving some parts of the negotiations along.
Because our lead negotiator doens’t lead on everything…
It’s funny but in a year of adopting a negotiator I have never touched on the different types of negotiators in my blog, I guess it’s never to late to provide the basics…
So here I go to try and explain what really goes on in the team.
So if your delegation is big enough (UK’s definitely is, Tanzania’s is not…) anyway, if your delegation is big enough you have negotiators to deal with all the different parts of the text. Negotiators will specialise in a certain area such as forests or technology and know very little about others. If you are part of a negotiating bloc you may also have negotiators who deal with that. For example the UK delegation has negotiators who deal specifically with EU negotiations.
And to add one more level to the mix you also get two very different types of negotiators. Political and technical.
Political negotiators deal with the wrangling between countries over what everyone is going to do.
Technical deal with the…well the technical bits…. the hard core details of how all these mechanisms we are saying we will use will actually work.
The UK have some of the very old timers in both sets.
This means this week we have been hearing British accents in both the more political negotiations of the LCA (long term cooperative action) and in the technical aspects of the KP (Kyoto protocol).
Our UK head of delegation has stepped up and is now leading for the EU in the LCA (the political bit) and our forests guy is leading the EU in the forest mechanism sections of the KP (the technical bits).
Though they are both British we have been hearing their voices coming from the Spanish seat. This is because the EU negotiates as a bloc and it is the country who currently hold the EU presidency who will speak on behalf of us all, at the moment this is Spain therefore their seat is where our UK EU negotiators sit (just one more unfccc quirk…).
I’m sorry, this has been a rather technical blog on negotiators today.
But the reason I’m telling you this is because it means the UK really have some influence within the EU negotiating team at the minute.
Lets hope thay are using it well!
And to lighten up my rather technical blog I thought i’d tell you that I saw ALL of the UK delegation at the party on Saturday to say goodbye to Yvo de Boer!
And I can only see this as a good thing, positive moods can only lead to positive negotiations!
Negotiator Tracker - Anna Collins
Anna Collins Born and bred in Warrington in the *sunny* North of England, Anna was brought up by parents with a deep sense of justice and taught to always fight for what she believed is right. "I guess you could say it was in the blood, my gran went to Greenham Common in the 80s"... read more»
Read more of Anna's posts here.
Follow Anna on twitter @artnotpolicy
