Everyone seems shocked and discouraged by the outcome in Copenhagen. They shouldn’t be. We must control emissions. So why wasn’t there a deal that made everyone happy? Because that’s the nature of multilateral negotiations, with scores of parties with scores of interests. They are always, always like this, as anyone who has studied them knows: no one gets what they want, unless they can hold the final decision hostage. For an example of that strategy, look at the health care bill in Congress, tied up by the cynical calculations of Senators Ben Nelson and Joe Lieberman. Look back at the Kyoto Protocol.
Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger had it right when he told ABC News that the negotiations were a lot of “kabuki”. (Do you really think President Obama’s sudden appearance at a meeting the Chinese did not expect him at wasn’t theater, too? So was China’s Wen Jiabao’s decision to send lower-level officials to meet with President Obama.)
The negotiating process follows a very specific arc. The more parties, the more complex, fraught and risky it becomes. So with almost 200 countries present, the odds of a clean, pure agreement on a sweeping, binding law were always practically nil, even in the fairly weak field of international law.
Negotiations, like all games, are the process of the passage of time and its contained events. Early in any negotiation, most of the time is spent posturing, jockeying for position, and deciding angle. Testing the waters, testing the other side, making friends and allies, setting up competing early drafts of an agreement — particularly ones that suits your interests best, while giving the other side just enough to stay interested. These preemies never work — if they did, the other side would know for sure they are not getting all they could. But they do begin to give people a vague sense of what matters for a framework.
Most Americans find such behavior exasperating, infuriating. We think: just agree! Or come up with something better that we like too — right now! Then again, most Americans hate to haggle: it’s bad form. The rest of the world works differently.
Last minute negotiations — and they always come down to the last minute— are fuelled by some desperation to save face by getting something done, a sense that the other side is now (on some level) a partner in all this, and a certain amount of the game of chicken. Sometimes exhaustion allows for compromises that would never otherwise be considered.
Copenhagen achieved some things: focus on the problems of poor countries and climate change; money to prevent de-forestation. True, emissions were not cut; there is no enforcement. As with the mice trying to decide who bells the cat, no one was willing to risk their interests for a common good. So there is a lot of disgruntlement. Failure is like that.
But there is the future (by that I mean next year). Perhaps now that everyone has had their say in pure democratic form and seen what a mess that can make, coalitions will come together and each send a representative team to cut down on the number of parties at the bargaining table. Such a step would increase the odds of success next time. Apparently, Copenhagen itself was only a step towards dealing with climate change, as was Kyoto before it. A big problem will get a mammoth negotiation. It will take years, but humanity will survive – it has through all the catastrophes of time. (The world has been about to end so often and for so many reasons, it can be hard to keep track.)
Compromise has its costs and is slow; that’s the downside to democracy. But would anyone like to change systems?
