Bracketing civil society participation in climate talks

Bracketing civil society participation

I have now been walking the halls of the UN climate conferences for three years and have been increasingly struggling with a simple question. Why do some governments fear so much the presence and support of civil society? Aren’t we all (countries and NGOs) supposed to be here to address the climate crisis?

The participation paradox
There is in the UN climate process something of a participation paradox. Governmental delegates expect that the participation of civil society will help them move forward more effectively than they would otherwise be able to (and civil society delegates are doing their best to do so). They expect civil society to provide expertise input in highly technical discussions.

But there’s the rub. For NGOs to fully play such a role, they would need to be able to understand exactly what is going on, and to share their views on how countries interested in addressing the climate crisis could make progress in this endeavor. At present, the opportunities for NGOs to play more than a passive role are frankly, quite limited. During the most active days of the negotiations, the doors leading to at least half of negotiation rooms are literally guarded by a standing UN security officer, whose only role is to prevent NGOs from even sitting quietly at the back and listening. When allowed to make a statement to react at the end of a specific
discussion, NGOs are expected to submit the text of their intervention 24 hours in advance, before the discussion has even started. And during the last conference in Cancun, NGOs needed to register any actions that they organized 2 full days in advance.

It’s not more senseless than expecting general practitioners to propose a treatment before even seeing their patients, and meet them only to deliver the prescription.

Enhancing NGOs engagement
For about eighteen months, we have been engaged in a long series of discussions to identify how civil society participate more effectively to the work done under the climate convention. Interestingly, representatives from various groups of stakeholders aren’t calling for any participatory revolution but are focused on very pragmatic demands which will enable them to accomplish what they came for – and what parties expect them to do: participate and support the negotiations! Concretely, NGOs have insisted on rather basic requests, such as negotiations meetings to be open as a default rule (with closed meetings when negotiators feel it would be needed), the right to intervene properly in the discussions and the respect of a space for the free expression of NGOs.

[Civil Society], [Legitimacy], and [Transparency]
Considering that NGOs focused their claims on very down-to-earth proposals, it was stunning to witness the energy deployed by Saudi Arabia to systematically bracket each and every substantial proposal contained in the draft text on improvement of observers engagement. Not only did the Saudis inform the rest of the delegates that they would not consider addressing the restrictions imposed on NGOs during this session, but they also declared that this should not be one for at least another 2 or 3 years. More surprising was the support that their backwards-looking position received from India and Antigua-Barbuda when they came to agree to “provide guidance” so as to make more meetings transparent.

On the other hand, delegates from Australia, Mexico, Bolivia and the EU repeatedly expressed strong support for an enhanced participation of civil society. Discussions on this issue will be dragged out til Thursday, and NGOs both count on these latter four countries to keep reminding others of the necessity to promote the transparency and inclusiveness of the parties. Perhaps India and Antigua-Barbuda could also take this opportunity to correct their stand and realize that they have nothing to fear, on the contrary, from having NGOs active at their side.