Each year, nearly 200 countries participate in the UN Climate Conference (COP) to discuss the impact of climate change and find solutions to deal with it. However, year after year these conferences have failed to bring us closer to global temperature rises that scientists agree will safeguard planetary stability.
This year’s COP29, held in Baku, Azerbaijan, was the latest iteration of such failure where developed countries pledged to mobilise at least US$300 billion annually by 2035 to support developing countries in addressing climate change. This is significantly short of the $1.3 trillion per year requested by developing countries and an embarrassing crumb of the $5 to $6.3 trillion they desperately need. Similarly, no major agreement was reached on Article 6 of the Paris Agreement – agreed at COP21 in 2015. Simultaneously, contentious debates continued on setting a clear roadmap for a transition away from fossil fuels.
Why do COPs fail?
There are many reasons to explain why COPs fail. One of these is how COPs operate. For instance, consensus-building amongst countries with diverse vested interests is simply not fit for the purpose of tackling the magnitude of the crisis. A one-country-one-vote system can obviate historical, procedural, and systemic injustices. It tries to put all countries on the same level playing field, when today’s political reality is far from equal. Nations are part of a world system of dependencies and extraction that deepens inequities between rich and poor countries.
There are also other reasons. One of which is the spatial and participatory politics of who goes to COP (and who doesn’t), and which space one has access to (and where not). The spaces of participation and zones of exclusion tell us a lot about who COPs are designed for, and who they seek to repudiate and exclude.
The politics of COP
Where COP takes place matters, the six UN-designated geo-regions rotate the role of hosting COP and the presidency of it each year. The Presidency of the event not only wields convening power, but also sets the agenda of the conference, facilitates negotiations, and oversees the drafting of key documents. Living in today’s fossil capital reality means that the last conferences have been held at petrostates. It therefore comes as no surprise that the COP29 host – Azerbaijan – was found to promote fossil fuel deals ahead of the conference.
Whose COP?
Within the COP venue, representation is mediated by a hierarchy of class and access, codified by the status of one’s badge (the ticket that grants one’s entry into the conferences). Usually, civil society, including youth, participate as ‘observers’ in the negotiation process, while government representatives enter as “Parties.” There are other classes that sit in between, including UN agencies, Intergovernmental organisations, and the press. Being given observer status limits access to certain meetings and provides little power to influence negotiations directly.
There is an irony in this class structure: those who have the most to win (and to lose) from the negotiation outcomes are being rendered to the margins of the very rooms that determine their future. At COP29, access to spaces was particularly constrained. While the UN and countries typically would save at least one seat in negotiation rooms for representatives of each fraction of civil society (women, labour unions, Indigenous peoples, children and youth, and others), most deliberations this year were limited to meetings that were exclusive to negotiators.
Image below shows a poster at COP29 indicating the various codified badge types and access levels.
But even so, being allocated a badge to attend COP is just half the story. The politics of COPs are further textured by global border regimes and mobility. Participants from the global South face tremendous barriers to getting to the COP location, especially having visas delayed or denied, not to mention the flights, accommodation, and even subsistence costs that only elites can afford.
Over the past decades, the diplomatic symbolism of multilateral climate politics has degraded while the conference spaces have expanded to serve business interests. Outside the negotiation rooms, climate conferences have been enabling spaces for an uncountable number of fringe events, business receptions and dealmaking, and other activities with the tendency to greenwash. Attending COP has become a business case. Not only do these distractive components of the conference overshadow the main negotiation processes, but the massive presence of corporate interests hinders civil society’s accessibility given the overall limitations within the conference space. This chronic exclusion, coupled with the vested fossil fuel interests of this Presidency, formed a core reason why many civil society activists chose to boycott COP29 this year.
Zones of business, zones of exclusion
This often questions the extension of the UN’s equity principles on the representation of marginalised voices and communities. For instance, marginalised and most vulnerable countries tend to have smaller delegations, undermining their ability to demonstrate their concerns in the wide variety of agenda items to negotiate over two weeks, often during competing hours. Last year, the Alliance of Small Island States (AOSIS) were left outside the main plenary hall when the final decisions were made. For whose future are the COP decisions made, and why are the very rightsholders to this future systemically excluded from these spaces?
It remains an indisputable fact that those who participate in COPs hold immense power and privilege, in terms of access, voice, and gaining social capital. This power should indeed be challenged, questioned, and held accountable. And they are, as the rise of global movements shifts attention away from COPs and more to communities, healing, and true justice (Anti-COP 2024 Declaration).
It goes without saying that multilateral events are far from the only place that matters, in fact, the grounded nature of climate disaster impacts makes local movements all the more important. If the system structure of subjugation replicates itself in the very place that seeks to tackle the implications of this inequality, subaltern voices will always be banished to the bottom rung of the ladder. And international climate politics will always work against the interests of those who are most impacted by intensifying climate disasters. Perhaps, as economist Fadhel Kaboub says, ‘COP29 was not about climate, it was about not disrupting the economic and geopolitical hierarchy of power.’
