Towards a New Climate Alliance: The Cartagena Dialogue

This case describes the story of a group of climate negotiators who in the aftermath of a failed climate summit decide to create a new alliance that cuts across traditional divides. The case focusses on how the main actors design the norms around the alliance: the group meets in secret, it doesn’t have a stable membership, participants always show up as individuals (not as country representatives), the group promotes learning rather than agreement, they brainstorm potential ideas, but never writes them down as joint positions, instead advancing them within their own delegations. The case invites a discussion of how the way by which groups discuss, and the procedural expectations define what type of negotiations will materialize. In addition, the case discusses how the ideas of an informal group of connected actors ultimately make their way into the formal process. There are several ways: the group initially works by reshaping the positions of the various delegations they are a member of, but over time ends up strategizing more explicitly: They propose text to strategic actors (such as the facilitators of formal processes), they coordinate their interventions during COPs, and they begin blocking positions in their groups, when they don’t serve its purpose. This latter part lends itself for a discussion of transferring ideas from informal into formal processes and more broadly, it allows for a discussion of principles of effective diplomacy, specifically, the process of creating relationships across divides to pre-negotiate ideas in informal spaces as a useful means to influence outcomes (rather than understanding diplomacy as just showing up at summits and coordinating positions).

The group ended up playing an important role in the aftermath of the disastrous Copenhagen COP to drive towards an ambitious international climate agreement by circumventing several shortcomings of the formal UN process, including the tendency to engage negotiators in formal settings, with strict norms on how to communicate; the strong formalized division between countries into diametrically opposed camps that doesn’t surface nuanced shared interests across subcamps; and the ensuing tendency that negotiators focus their energy on defending the positions of their country or coalition rather than engaging in creative problem solving.