I’m back in London after a week in Copenhagen at various climate events. Almost everything climate-related that happened in and around Copenhagen over the past two weeks offers rich pickings for reflection on the changing relationship between democracy and climate change.
As we start work on our project here at the Foundation for Democracy and Sustainable Development on ‘the future of democracy in the face of climate change‘, we’ll be reflecting on the big question: what next?
We’ll be looking, not just at the critically important coming twelve months, but beyond, to 2050 and 2100.
So in this blog post I highlight some of the ‘democracy and climate change’ themes that emerged in Copenhagen.
Public protest and climate change
One of the most headline-grabbing issues in Copenhagen concerned the methods used by Danish police to manage very largely peaceful protest.
The images of (mostly police) violence and mass detentions on the streets of Copenhagen run the risk of deterring many concerned citizens in Europe and North America from exercising their right to protest. That would be great pity, for it could stifle the birth of the kind of mass movement that politicians such as Ed Miliband say is needed to support government leadership on climate change.
But those same images are just as likely to radicalise others, fuelling further scepticism over the political will of elected national leaders to take seriously the wishes of citizens who favour ambitious action to tackle climate change.
It’s clearly not just Danish police who worry about and cooperate on climate protest. There were plainclothes police officers at Harwich Port on Sunday to meet the ferry from the Danish port of Esbjerg; and there were dogs and lengthy searches on the overland border between Germany and Denmark when I travelled out on a coach organised by a UK-based action group.
Alliances between vulnerable countries and civil society
Another striking feature of the overall dynamics in Copenhagen was the strong links forged between global civil society present in Copenhagen and leaders of some of the most immediately vulnerable countries. The adulation and standing ovation given to President Nasheed of the Maldives when he spoke to a packed meeting at the ‘alternative’ climate venue, Klimaforum, and the chorus of tweeting that surrounded his public speeches during the conference, are a case in point.
Shifting negotiating dynamics
Then there were the visible shifts in the negotiating dynamics between the world’s richest countries and the so-called ‘emerging economies’ whose carbon emissions are set to rise rapidly as their economies grow. The EU was strikingly not one of the countries mentioned by President Obama when he announced in a press conference in the evening of 18th December that a base deal had been reached. It emerged that the core parties to the non-binding accord that was subsequently merely ‘noted’ by the UN were the US, Brazil, South Africa, India and China.
Many of the world’s poorest countries remained politically marginalised in the official climate talks; but it was clear both that important shifts had taken place. New patterns of alliances are emerging within and out of the G77.
The decision of African group leader, Ethiopian Prime Minister Meles Zenawi, to stand with France to support the EU-backed maximum two degree temperature rise (making a regional 3-3.5 degree rise the suggested likely reality for Africa) together with a ‘quick-start’ finance package of USD 10 billion fell far short of prior African demands. It was greeted with consternation and charges of a sell-out by many Africans including the Sudanese chair of the G77/China group, Ambassador Lumumba Stanislaus Di-Aping as well as African civil society groups.
Business gets on with it
Meanwhile, an entirely different tone was evident in reports of business events in the city. These were abuzz with talk about the positive green business opportunities generated by the climate change agenda, and the technical detail of measurement, accounting, green technology and much more.
In contrast, the interests of those businesses that stand to lose from tough climate mitigation actions were far less visible. Yet these made themselves felt in cautious speeches from some government officials and politicians and, most fundamentally, in the failure to reach intergovernmental agreement on emissions targets during the conference.
City mayors talk positive
City mayors from around the world met at an event organised by the City of Copenhagen during the official talks; the Copenhagen Climate Summit for Mayors. According to an informal email from one participant: “This looked and felt like a team! They listened to each other’s plans, they openly encouraged plagiarism and replication, they fostered support for each other in a way that was uncontrived, open and positive. They discussed technical fixes, finance and resources, education and engaging citizens: they discussed mitigation and adaptation, economic opportunity and necessity: and they recognised they need to be leaders of substantial cultural change.”.
Official talks mirror wider international development concerns
In contrast, other events, more closely linked to the themes under discussion in the official talks, replicated core concerns of the overall international development agenda. International donor agencies such as the UN Environment Programme, for example, lobbied for their organisations to be home to funds committed to help countries to adapt to climate change.
Intense discussions over how the funds should be managed; and about capacity-building and ‘good governance’ for climate adaptation in developing countries (long part of the jargon of the international development agenda) took place; and longstanding arguments about the lack of transparency in global negotiations linked closely to economic interests and about the huddles of influential states in so-called ‘green rooms’ were aired; and aired in ways that were not markedly different to an international trade negotiation.
Divide between ‘bottom-up’ and ‘top-down’ solutions
But one point above others stands out: the huge political and psychological distance between the key issues and solutions debated during the official negotiations at the Bella Centre (where the formal talks took place), and the belief in bottom-up locally owned and self-managed solutions that characterised many of the ‘unofficial’ side meetings for civil society at the Klimaforum space and in a variety of other meetings spaces around the city.
Indeed, with the slow pace of progress in intergovernmental talks, it has become apparent that much more emphasis will now likely be placed on local level innovation to deliver climate solutions.
Already in the UK, commentators are paying renewed attention to the groundswell of community-based activism that has sprung up over the last couple of years away from the formalities of ballot-box decision-making or the stifling bureaucratic decision-making of some town halls.
This renewed call to ‘community-based local solutions’ is both valuable in practice and laudable as prescription; the more so when it builds community ties and hence the ability to remain resilient in the face of climate change.
And yet, a note of caution must here be sounded on two grounds. First, because it was noticeable in Copenhagen that the vision of ‘bottom-up’ decision-making that was articulated in many side events was not accompanied by a seamless vision of the role of national government; or of the much-vaunted national level ‘leadership’ that became a war-cry of campaigners during Copenhagen (e.g. in statements of the ‘politicians go to fancy dinners; leaders act’ sort).
Related to this is the real-world fact that any failure of global democracy resulting from negotiating inequality between nations is necessarily also a failure of national government.
In the run-up to the 2002 Johannesburg World Summit on Sustainable Development, governments encouraged so-called ‘Type 2′ agreements to be tabled and to become a formal part of the Summit’s outcomes. These were essentially voluntary agreements or partnerships between different stakeholders to tackle different dimensions of sustainable development. But there was a backlash from some potential ‘Type 2 agreement’ signatories, who accused governments of passing the buck to non-governmental actors instead of getting on with reaching a deal themselves.
There must be a risk that the same will happen now on climate change: that governments will seek to bring citizen and business-led voluntary action into a bigger intergovernmental tent at the expense of much-needed national level leadership.
That is not in itself a bad thing, but must not become a substitute for effective action at the national and international government levels.
Second is the reality that politics is nowhere more personalised; nowhere more exposing, than at the local level. Any move formally to institutionalise a prioritisation of local level decision-making needs also be accompanied by efforts to tackle marginalisation and social exclusion in local level decision-making; to ensure that minority views are given due weight.
Localism must not become a banner under which marginalisation or ‘business as usual’ decision-making by vocal elites become entrenched in public policy.
The apparent distance between local and global level solutions – a canyon or a rift at best – was made all the deeper by the Copenhagen organisers’ unforgivable failure, over at the official Conference of the Parties at the Bella Centre on the outskirts of the city, adequately to make provision for non-governmental observers of the Conference (including this one, who lacked the stamina of some to stand in a freezing queue for 6-9 hours on the last day that non-governmental organisations without ’secondary’ badges were allowed to exchange their pre-registration for entry badges to the venue. To add insult to injury, a later invitation to join an alternative venue for those Observers who had been excluded from the latter part of the event was itself only extended to those who had passed the initial hurdle).
Civil society and climate change
It is now an established (and hard fought-for) maxim of environmental policy that environmental decisions – including at the international level – are best made with the full participation of interested citizens.
At international level, this maxim (which goes further than any globally agreed text but nonetheless builds on Principle 10 of the Rio Declaration) has for some time supported participation of non-governmental organisations and civil society groups as observers in intergovernmental negotiations; briefing negotiators, adding technical expertise, and bringing transparency to otherwise obscure negotiations between civil servants as often as elected politicians.
This civil society participation has not been without its problems; there has on occasion been fear that the structures of non-governmental organisations around the world and the potential dominance of larger groups simply reflect wider imbalances of bargaining power between nations. But in the climate talks, there is a remarkable coincidence of interest between the calls of civil society for climate justice and ambitious emissions targets, and the headline interests of more vulnerable nations.
When the ejection of impressive news source Avaaz and of Friends of the Earth and Tcktcktck from the official talks coincided with the ‘Reclaim Power’ climate justice march on Wednesday 16th December, it appeared that an entire army of officials had just scored an own goal.
Battles that many NGOs considered fought and won may now need to be fought and won again.
Beyond Copenhagen, there is renewed pressure on civil society around the world to make its voice heard above the non-voting views of economic interests and politicians limited by short-term political priorities or (in some countries) crude opinion poll data. This is precisely the message that is emerging from the larger non-governmental organisations: “we don’t have a real deal, and we’re not done yet”, is the essential message.
To put it another way, ‘we’re all eco-warriors now’.
One thing is certain: action based on this insight will undoubtedly shape both the course of democracy, and the course of climate change, in the coming months and years.
[A version of this post will also be cross-posted on the Local Democracy blog over at http://blog.localdemocracy.org.uk/]
