One day at the COP29 climate conference in Baku last week, I ran into a veteran of these sprawling talks who said he had been rereading Getting to Yes, the best-selling book on how to negotiate.
“It just made me laugh,” said former EU negotiator, Kaveh Guilanpour, from the C2ES climate think tank.
COPs could deliver significant agreements, he said, but generally after messy, zero-sum wrangling that was the opposite of the book’s advice on how to negotiate successfully.
He has a point. All too often, COPs have been better at getting to no. Progress is predictably glacial in talks between nearly 200 countries with wildly differing interests, that take decisions by consensus, not a majority vote.
Even when deals finally emerge, they are often deliberately drafted to allow multiple sides to say they have won. Witness 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 power, heating and cooling. Take your pick. “That would never happen in business, where lawyers make sure each side knows precisely what they’re signing up for,” says British economist Michael Jacobs, a seasoned COP watcher.
Nonetheless, these two-week tussles over financial, legal, trade, farming, health and scientific issues, to name just a few agenda items, make COPs the Olympics of negotiations.
And as Getting to Yes says, negotiation is a fact of life, whether you are trying to buy a house, close a business deal or squeeze a pay rise from your boss.
Helpfully, there are a few things that can be learnt from these talks, starting with the importance of knowing your enemy.
Many successful COP negotiators get their way by knowing exactly how their opponents are likely to react. One man told me last week he once went to a COP meeting where he knew that whatever he said was going to 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 opposed it and unwittingly delivered the desired result.
This is a reminder of the need for a certain level of negotiating ruthlessness, even if it seems risky.
The testy 2011 COP in Durban, South Africa eventually agreed a deal paving the way for the 2015 Paris Agreement after what has gone down in climate talks lore as “the huddle that made history”.
As the meeting ran more than a day over time, a handful of top negotiators frantically tried to iron out a compromise on the conference floor, surrounded by a sea of photo-snapping journalists and delegates.
Fearing the worst, one European rushed to the stage to ask the COP president, South Africa’s Maite Nkoana-Mashabane, if a room could be found for the envoys to hash out a solution in private. “She said, ‘No, it’s best to leave them there because they will make a decision’,” this man told me in Baku. “And she was right. They did.”
That story underlines the importance of the human element in any negotiation.
Before she became European Central Bank president, Christine Lagarde is said to have stopped food being served to French and German negotiators during one long round of talks in Brussels. The Germans eventually gave up out of hunger, according to the former IMF chief’s biographer.
Billionaire financier, Carl Icahn, is a famous night owl known for holding negotiations long past most people’s bedtimes, giving him an edge over exhausted opponents.
COPs are not immune from this sort of thing.
Lead negotiators are not above holding important meetings in small rooms to keep down numbers and hasten decisions. It’s no fun for those left standing for hours on end, as one victim told me.
On a more cheering note, COPs have also illustrated the importance of pleasing physical locations for negotiations.
After the disappointing Copenhagen COP of 2009, which ended in recriminations after failing to produce a strong deal, Mexico’s beachside city of Cancún was chosen for the 2010 meeting that had to revive the process.
At one point when the Cancún talks grew tense, Mexico’s top negotiator disappeared from the room and returned to slam a bottle of tequila down on the table.
“It was a real icebreaker,” one delegate with happy memories of the moment told me last week. The show went back on the road.