RENEGOTIATING IN A CROWD:

The Challenge of Conference Diplomacy

By Julian Wittkamp

Associate Consultant, Rational Games, Inc.

November 1, 2024

How to “negotiate” in the vastness of a Diplomatic Conference?

Diplomatic conferences are fairly ubiquitous, held frequently all over the world and usually seeking to address one of the many issues of global concern:

matters of war and peace, rights and justice, trade and resources.

Some of the biggest and most well-known are the Conferences of the Parties (COPs), which are broadly focused on countering Climate Change and preserving our natural ecosystems. This year, all three of these take place in quick succession over just a couple of weeks. But with 193 sovereign UN member states sending delegations – how does one even negotiate?

COP28 in Dubai last year was attended by close to 100,000 people. Almost 25,000 of these were official delegates taking full part in the negotiations (with the host United Arab Emirates registering a delegation of an incredible 620 people).

To complicate matters even further: these delegations are normally not mandated to be autonomous negotiators but must rather constantly shuttle back and forth between the world stage and their home ministries (often several at a time), receiving and convening updated talking points on technical content, political initiatives, and acceptable positions.

Add to that the severe time pressure, insignificant amounts of sleep, the chattering noises of thousands of people, jetlag, maze-like event locations, issues with the local commute, food, technical equipment and/or language barriers – and you indeed will find yourself in

the authentic setting of a large-scale international conference.

Needless to say, it is a rather confusing and exhausting place for a negotiator to navigate. Naturally, such settings can be overwhelming. Almost certainly, they could lead to major chaos were it not for the guidelines of structure. Large parts of the official “negotiations” play out under formal so-called “Rules of Procedure”, with set time limitations for individual statements and long lists of consecutive speaker slots.

Here, political positions are relentlessly presented, compared, and reevaluated, slowly steering the gigantic multilateral boat towards a generally common direction.

Apart from the plenary, the main work commences in semi-formal parallel work streams, moving through draft texts on projector screens and discussing the wording bracket by bracket.

Generally, the negotiators mostly finalize agreement on what was already circulated long in advance. Unless background dynamics have led to sudden political changes or individual delegations choose to make strategic use of the plenary for new announcements, most general positions of the parties will already be well known to each other from the extensive communications during the months of preparation that led up to the Conference.

To pre-filter this mess of individual positions, regional groups like the African or European Union and like-minded states such as the G7 will (ideally) already have aligned most of their positions in advance, often proclaiming them in joint statements. But even between these blocs, many contentious issues will not be agreed upon until the eleventh hour of the conference. With some issues evidencing strongly diverging individual interests in certain matters of national priority, the extent of their unity is constantly tested. In well-calculated attempts, spoilers may also actively try to undermine the integrity of a bloc.

It is safe to say that conference diplomacy never just plays out at the conference, but rather that the conference itself is just the culmination point of a long-prepared process of pre-negotiations and bloc formation.

Hence, one may rightly ask: isn’t that all just communication? Where between all those email chains, position matrixes for bloc alignment, capital calls, and national statements, does anyone get to negotiate “Freely”?

To a certain extent, it appears, not often. From a different perspective, however, all that communication is in itself the process of negotiation – just less tangible for the individual negotiator and spread out across thousands of screens and faces instead of a couple of sheets and an office room.

But finally, it is indeed the individual negotiators, their networks and relationships that carry the problem-solving capacity of a diplomatic conference. Only the human sensitivity and creative minds of skilled representatives allow the parties to step back from entrenched positions and re-design the subtleties of diplomatic language to better reflect their underlying mutual interests. Especially in the eleventh hour, hallways and coffee tables again become the places where the sticky stuff gets cleared and the rifts are bridged or ironed out.

Ideally, the communication machinery of modern global multilateralism will carry the process far enough to effectively filter the immense complexity and provide a broad basis for an overall result renegotiating in a crowd. But in the end, it is the individual negotiators who must make the final decisions that offer solutions on behalf of their various governments and constituents.

Hopefully, by then, they are not worn out from lack of sleep!