If you want to go fast, go alone…

I’m confused. Really confused.

I’ve been following the UNFCCC process for 2 years now, I’ve slowly got to grips with whats going on, what the acronyms mean, and how all these complicated sets of negotiations come together. I came to Bonn pretty confident in my ability to keep on top of things, to pick up documents and know what they meant, to see what meetings were going on and know what they were discussing in them.

I was wrong.

I’m confused.

For a while I thought I had lost it, that my magic UNFCCC super policy wonk powers had deserted me. I didn’t want to mention it to anyone for fear of looking like an idiot, but then I overcame my fear and mentioned it to one person, then another and another.

And it turns out I’m not alone. There’s rather a lot of confused people in the halls.

One reason is because at this session we are no longer working in the big negotiating groups that we are used to seeing. It is usual at these sessions to break out of full plenary (where all the countries sit together) into smaller groups, however this time round things seem to have got out of control.

Today we had up to 30 informal sessions going on, on a range of issues, under all the different sections of the negotiations. We had contact groups, we had informal consultations, we had informal informals, we had informal informal informals, we even had some people chatting in the bar… The amount and the different scope of all the sessions is simply mind blowing. But it’s not just the number of sessions that is depleting my super policy wonk powers, no it’s also what they are discussing. This negotiating session is really not about the big political issues such as emission reduction targets or amount of finance (though of course they will never not be issues and we are definitely still seeing discussion on these things), but here a lot of what is going on is very much about the technicalities and the details of specific parts of the negotiations. This stuff is important as we head to Durban and hope to get more of it ironed out, but the sheer complexity, volume and scope of it all means i’m not the only one whose head is hurting.

I can only imagine what the smaller delegations are thinking of it all. Because this whole informal informal informals, multiple meeting situation, is a double edged sword. On the one side its great that they are getting down to business, that these discussions are happening and that some things are getting done. But on the other hand when there are so many meetings going on if your team is small it is completely impossible to participate in them all.

And it’s not just the smaller teams who can’t participate fully when the negotiations are going on in this form, it’s civil society too. Because when the negotiators break down into informal informal consultations and meetings in the bar, the doors are firmly closed. The negotiators here say this is so they can be franker and get stuff done, which in a way I can totally understand - I think all of us are more likely to be honest when we feel we are not being watched, people are more likely to talk openly and say what they are thinking.

But is it for the best? I really don’t know.

I know for sure that I would prefer it if civil society were allowed in, for me this is a power issue and I don’t believe in allowing the political elite to dominate the way we work. However as someone who has also struggled with this process and the slowness of it all I appreciate that these smaller closed informal groups may get stuff done.

I guess as this rumbles on I’m looking for a compromise. I want to do it well, I want to do it fairly, but I want to do it fast - this is a time bound situation. And when I commit that to paper, when I think of the internal conflict, then the external discussions that this conflict involves, I realise that this is it, isn’t it?

This is the dilemma at the crux of it all.

Climate change presents us with an issue we have to act on fast, with the most urgency of perhaps any issue in the history of humankind. But it also presents us with an issue that affects humankind as a whole like none before, consequently demanding a way of working, a solution, that is a just and fair one for all.

What we need is something which is fair and fast.

If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together.

But what if you need to go far and fast?