Facilitating chaos

Posted on 04. Dec, 2010 by annac in United Kingdom

Something’s happened, something very strange. And, well, it’s a bit embarrassing.

I think my love of Christiana Figueres may have got out of hand…

After a week here at cop I have turned in to some kind of facilitation/process obsessive. This is (basically) the job Christiana plays here, facilitating the unfccc process to try and make things run smoothly, fairly and help countries reach consensus.

And now I’m at it too (although on a much smaller scale). I think I’m trying to be her!

As well as tracking at these talks I also work together with other young people from all around the world who are here making sure we have a say in these negotiations. This year I have been involved in the facilitation of our morning meetings. Like the unfccc we use a consensus based model for decision making and this means we have to make sure we use the right process to come to these decisions. Facilitating meetings like this really opens your eyes to how hard it is to do, and makes me very grateful that the unfccc can come to any decisions at all!

One of the most important things you do when facilitating a meeting like this is to make sure that everyone knows what’s going to happen - the order of the process, how things will work. Then they will hopefully follow what’s going on better, and a decision will be easier to come to. Now I know we’re not in a meeting, and that really this is Christiana’s job, but I thought it might also be good to try and explain to you the order things are happening here, so you too might be able to understand and follow what is going on.

So we have two weeks of negotiations here in Cancun, and we are nearly half way through. On the first day they opened, as all unfccc negotiations do, with plenaries, where everyone just made statements about their positions. The next thing they then do is a lot of process, they must adopt the agenda of the meeting and decide how they are going to work. Here in Cancun that took 4 days…. 4 days of only 2 weeks of negotiations! The reason it took so long was because they went off on a tangent about whether they were going to continue to use a consensus model, or switch to a voting method of working. 4 days later they decided to stick with consensus, and I’m not even going to begin to go into a rant about this little diversion.

Luckily they didn’t delay all other negotiations while they did this and on Tuesday parallel to those discussions contact groups started. Now contact groups are where the negotiators break down into smaller groups to try and find some ways forward in specific areas of the negotiations. Basically it’s like taking a friend you disagree with out for a coffee to try and patch up the friendship and move forward. Until it’s happened you can’t hang out with your whole friendship group because there will be tension.

Yesterday (Thursday) the negotiators got down to actually drafting text, to actually working on the document that will one day form the outcome of these talks. This means we are back to line by line negotiating, over commas, syntax and wording. What a nightmare.

But because it took them so long to get to the drafting stage we have another unfccc classic situation on our hands. Because guess what folks…

Yep, they have run out of time.

Yes we do have a whole week left, but this is not like other meetings, though we have a week left the process has to move to the next stage. On Sunday the ministers arrive and for the next week it is them, not the negotiators who will be leading the process. For Monday and Tuesday this will be lower key, a sort of bridging couple of days where they will work with the negotiators. Then on Wednesday we will enter the high level segment properly. Then it will be time for the process to be set aside and the real politics to start. This should lead to the ministers signing off on decisions on Friday night.

Well that’s how it’s supposed to go, but as I said, we have a un classic on our hands and the text isn’t ready.

So what happens now?

Well, just like at a youth meeting when we have been talking for hours and no decision has been made, this is where the facilitators step in. This time it is not Christiana but another of the facilitators in the form of Mexico, as the hosts of this COP. They have been working to try and find a way forward with the process that allows us to actually get somewhere, and soon we should be seeing the fruit of this labour in the form of a new text. Unlike in Copenhagen when the Danes produced a text that they had only consulted a few parties on, the Mexicans have been working hard to consult with all parties. But even still, whether this text will make parties happy we will only see when it appears on either Saturday or Sunday.

All I can say as we wait for it though, is I’m glad I’m not going to be the facilitator when it’s first brought to the table…

Good luck Christiana!

Tags: Cancún, Christiana Figueres, contact groups, COP16, facilitation, featured, process, UNFCCC