One day at the COP29 climate conference in Baku last week, I ran into a veteran of these extensive conversations who said he had been rereading get to yesThe best-selling book on how to negotiate.
“It just made me laugh,” said former EU negotiator Kaveh Guilanpour of the climate think tank C2ES.
COPs could achieve important agreements, he said, but generally after confusing, zero-sum disputes, that was the opposite of the book’s advice on how to negotiate successfully.
You are right. Too often, COPs have managed to get better at no. Unsurprisingly, progress is glacial in talks between nearly 200 countries with very different interests, making decisions by consensusnot a majority vote.
Even when agreements finally emerge, they are often deliberately drafted to allow multiple parties to say they have won. Look at last year’s COP agreement in Dubai on a transition away from fossil fuels in “energy systems”. That could mean all energy use, or just energy, heating and cooling. Make your choice. “That would never happen in business, where lawyers make sure each party knows exactly what they are signing,” says British economist Michael Jacobs, a seasoned COP observer.
However, these two-week fights over financial, legal, trade, agricultural, health and scientific issues, to name just a few agenda items, make the COPs the Olympics of negotiations.
and how get to yes Negotiation is a reality, he says, whether you’re trying to buy a house, close a business deal, or get a raise from your boss.
Fortunately, there are a few things that can be learned from these talks, starting with the importance of knowing your enemy.
Many successful COP negotiators get their way by knowing exactly how their opponents will react. A man told me last week that he once went to a COP meeting where he knew that anything he said would be opposed by another country’s delegate. “So I went in and said the complete opposite of what I wanted,” he said. Sure enough, the other negotiator immediately objected and unknowingly achieved the desired result.
This is a reminder of the need for a certain level of ruthlessness in negotiations, even if it seems risky.
The testy 2011 COP in Durban, South Africa, finally reached an agreement that paved the way for the 2015 Paris Agreement, after what has gone down in climate talks history as “the meeting that made history.” .
As the meeting lasted more than a day, a handful of top negotiators frantically tried to reach a compromise at the conference, surrounded by a sea of journalists and photo-taking delegates.
Fearing the worst, one European rushed to the stage to ask COP President Maite Nkoana-Mashabane of South Africa if space could be found for the envoys to discuss a solution in private. “She said, ‘No, it’s better to leave them there because they will make a decision,’” this man told me in Baku. “And she was right. “They did it.”
That story underscores the importance of the human element in any negotiation.
Before becoming president of the European Central Bank, Christine Lagarde is said to have stopped serving food to French and German negotiators during a long round of talks in Brussels. Germans finally gave up due to hunger, according to former IMF chief biographer.
Billionaire financier Carl Icahn is a famous night owl known for keeping talks well past most people’s bedtime, giving him an advantage over his exhausted opponents.
COPs are not immune to this kind of thing.
Chief negotiators don’t hesitate to hold important meetings in small rooms to keep numbers down and speed up decisions. It’s no fun for those who stand for hours, as one victim told me.
On a more encouraging note, the COPs have also illustrated the importance of having pleasant physical venues for negotiations.
After the disappointing 2009 Copenhagen COP, which ended in recriminations for failing to reach a solid agreement, the Mexican coastal city of Cancun was chosen for the 2010 meeting that had to revive the process.
At a time when the Cancun talks became tense, Mexico’s chief negotiator disappeared from the room and returned to slam a bottle of tequila on the table.
“It was a real icebreaker,” a delegate with happy memories of the moment told me last week. The show was back on the road.