@COP17: Being New To The Game – Navigating My First COP

Today I am not writing about the uncertain future of the paltry global climate regime, but about the mysterious business of doing fieldwork at a mega-conference like COP17.

It is weird when you start planning to attend a major international negotiation session. You read that thousands of people attend these things and wonder how you will find your way around. You remember news reports about angry NGO members being locked out of conference facilities and wonder if you’ll be standing helplessly outside the conference center. And then you get here and those logistical things really don’t matter. But it doesn’t take long until you find out what’s really challenging when you try to do field research at a mega-event like this one. 

Lesson 1: You Feel Clueless, Most of The Time

A COP is overwhelming. But you get used to it.

I spent the first week of the conference on my own – I literally did not know a single person among the roughly 15.000 people here. That changed quickly. But when I walked the long corridors on day one, with the curious excitement that you have when you move to a new city and walk around your neighborhood for the first time, it seemed like I was the only one being silly enough to take this on alone. Everyone else seemed to be here with a delegation, a team, or an NGO, enjoying what I imagined to be the luxury of collective intelligence and institutional memory – surely they had it all under control, heading purposefully and confidently in and out of one of the many meeting rooms! Seeing people walk and talk, or sit and chat in small groups around piles of documents on small cafeteria tables, I kept thinking that I was the only one around here who had no idea what was going on.

Now, ten days into this experience, I discovered that coming here alone is not all that uncommon for PhD student, and that most people – including delegates - don’t really know what’s going on much of the time. And that seems to be a condition that does not change significantly over time, even if you attend these events for years. So you do what you can and enjoy the ride.

Lesson 2: You Are Not The Only One

The reason for the collective cluelessness is simple: complexity. There is so much happening at the same time – from plenary sessions, to working groups and informal meetings, press briefings, closed group meetings and side events – that it’s close to impossible to remember your own schedule for the day, let alone keep an eye on all of those parallel and often interlinked negotiation processes. There are more than 50 agenda items discussed at COP17, and the best you can do as a researcher is carefully choose a couple of these items and try to follow them instead of everything.

Although this observation does not sound terribly promising for international diplomacy (and many developing countries with small delegations struggle mightily to keep up with these negotiations), it made me feel better. And even if you are part of a big delegation, come well prepared and have a lot of experience, you can end up being locked out of the room where the real decisions are being made (an unpleasant lesson for the EU at COP15); or you don’t even know what room that is (not an uncommon experience for developing country delegates).  

Lesson 3: Observation Disillusions

I very much enjoyed my role as a silent observer during the first week, but it’s a pretty sobering (and exhausting) experience. You learn that the formalities of international negotiations are a waste of time, that parties’ statements (often made on behalf of negotiation groups) are shrouded in generalities and tend to have a message that you don’t understand if you have not been following the discussion for a while, that hardly anything gets done in a contact group, that there are things like ‘informal informals’ and non-papers. Once you have that down you start wondering where the real negotiations are taking place. How do they get rid of “the brackets” in a 130-page document between Wednesday and Friday? Certainly not with a hundred people in the room almost as big as a soccer stadium, but how? 

That bit will probably remain a mystery to me. But I am beginning to think that the solutions have very little to do with paper and brackets and options presented to ministers. When watching a small group of the key negotiators of the US and Brazil this morning, talking intensely for half an hour in the corridors, I started to think that it comes down to capable and passionate individuals, who need to be able to develop strong relationships with people who have very different interests, worldviews and attitudes than they do. And you quickly get a sense for who around here might be good at that. (Sadly, not many.)

Lesson 4: Observation Can Be Fun

But fun stuff happens too: You get to watch South African President Zuma give a speech (or two); Ban-ki Moon rushes past you when he comes out of a press briefing; you bump into Kofi Annan between the ICC and the DEC; and you get to see the UNFCCC Secretary, the fabulous and fashionable Christiana Figueres, dance the night away at the famous eNGO beach party.  

Lesson 5: Forget about Interviews

A key challenge for a researcher is knowing who is who. Names, faces, countries and negotiation groups – how would you know who you are passing by on the way to the Plenary? How do you find out who heads a delegation? And if you wanted to conduct an interview – how would you identify the person you want to talk to?

Time spent in meetings with big video screens and press briefings help – there is a reason why this is called reSEARCH! But if you are planning to conduct interviews with some of the really busy delegates during such a conference, you will run into a lot of walls. This is a good place to make an initial contact and make them aware you exist, but beyond that negotiators simply have no time for researchers. After all, here you are simply a distraction from their urgent task – ‘getting a deal’ if you are politician, ‘saving the world’ if you are an activist.

Lesson 6: Demystifying the Party Badge

Access to information is the most precious resource for any researcher around a mega conference. And the pink party-badge (mine is yellow) seems to be the key to the vault of knowledge. It opens doors to “Closed Meetings”, and puts those hot documents with the latest bracketed negotiation text into your hands. So you keep eying people with that object of your desire dangling around their neck, wondering if you might ever be in the possession of a party badge yourself.

At the end of week one I concluded that a party badge might be far less elusive than I had thought: I  met a McKinsey guy, an Oxford PhD student and a journalist, who have all been invited to join a government delegation for one reason or another. Who knows how many carriers of the pink badge are actually government representatives?

Lesson 7: There Are Others Like You

In the course of the last 10 days I have met many people like me: PhD researchers, think tank representatives, and NGO members, who try to understand what is going on, while advancing their own research or movement agenda. Building networks over lunch or simply chatting to the person sitting next to you in the back of a plenary session is really easy and fun. And sometimes these random meetings turn out to be very valuable, adding an interesting piece of knowledge to the big mess in your head. Many of these people have been meeting each other at these mega-events over the years, and these networks are very welcoming, making me feel less alone.

So if you are planning to do research at an international mega-conference (Rio+20 anybody?), get ready for a very intense but fun learning and networking experience!