One day at the COP29 climate conference in Baku last week, I met one of these eclectic negotiation veterans who said he was rereading his best-selling book on how to negotiate, Getting to Yes.
“It kind of made me laugh,” said Kaveh Girampour, a former EU negotiator at climate think tank C2ES.
He said that while the COP could result in important agreements, it generally ended in messy, zero-sum bickering, which was antithetical to the book’s advice on how to achieve successful negotiations.
He has a point. COPs are often better at saying no. Negotiations among some 200 countries with vastly different interests have progressed predictably slowly, with decisions being made by consensus rather than by majority vote.
Even if an agreement is ultimately reached, it is often deliberately drafted so that multiple parties can say they have won. Witness last year’s COP agreement in Dubai on transitioning away from fossil fuels in the ‘energy system’. This may mean all energy usage, or just electricity, heating, cooling, etc. Please choose. “That would never happen in a business setting, where the lawyers know exactly what both sides are signing,” said Michael Jacobs, a British economist with extensive experience monitoring the COP.
Nevertheless, these two-week battles over financial, legal, trade, agricultural, health, and scientific issues, to name just a few, make the COP the negotiating Olympics.
And, as “Getting to Yes” says, negotiation is a must, whether you’re buying a house, closing a deal, or getting your boss to give you a raise.
Beneficially, there are several things you can learn from these talks, starting with the importance of knowing your enemy.
Many successful COP negotiators get their way by knowing exactly how the other party is likely to react. One man told me last week that he once went to a COP meeting where he knew that whatever he said would be opposed by representatives of other countries. “So I went in and said the exact opposite of what I wanted,” he said. Sure enough, the other negotiator immediately objected, inadvertently producing the desired result.
This is a reminder that a certain level of ruthlessness is necessary in negotiations, even if it seems risky.
The acrimonious 2011 COP held in Durban, South Africa, has been passed down as the legend of climate change negotiations as a “history-making turmoil”, but ultimately an agreement was reached that paved the way for the 2015 Paris Agreement. did.
The meeting lasted more than a day, with several top negotiators desperately trying to find a compromise, surrounded by a throng of journalists and delegates taking photos.
Fearing the worst, a European rushed to the stage and asked COP President Maite Nkoana-Mashabane of South Africa if there was room for the envoys to work out a solution behind closed doors. “She said, ‘No, it’s best to leave it there because they will decide,'” this man told me in Baku. “And she was right. They did.”
This story highlights the importance of the human element in any negotiation.
Before Christine Lagarde became president of the European Central Bank, she is said to have stopped feeding French and German negotiators during one long negotiation in Brussels. According to the former IMF chief’s biographer, the Germans eventually gave up on hunger.
Billionaire investor Carl Icahn is a famous night owl, known for negotiating well past most people’s bedtime to gain an advantage over exhausted opponents. .
COP is not immune to this kind of thing.
Lead negotiators are willing to hold important meetings in small rooms to keep numbers down and decisions to be made quickly. As one victim told me, it’s not fun for someone who has been standing for hours on end.
Even better, the COP also demonstrated the importance of a comfortable physical location for negotiations.
After the disappointing 2009 Copenhagen COP, which failed to build a strong consensus and ended in criticism, the Mexican seaside city of Cancun was chosen to host the 2010 conference that needed to revive the process.
At one point during the tense negotiations in Cancun, Mexico’s top negotiator disappeared from the room, then returned and slammed a tequila bottle on the table.
“It was a real icebreaker,” one participant with fond memories of that time told me last week. The show is back on track.
