Paul Watkinson

You’ve seen the COP process from many perspectives through your roles as SBSTA Chair, lead negotiator and part of the COP21 Presidency team. In your experience, what characterises a good COP Presidency?

A COP Presidency needs to have its own vision of what it's trying to achieve. It needs to be clear on what its goals are for the COP, otherwise it's very hard to deliver. 

Different presidencies bring perspectives on different issues and areas of the world — and that's a good thing. You expect impartiality in the process, but you don't necessarily expect neutrality on the goals. 

So it's a combination of a clear vision of where we need to go and an openness and ability to listen to and engage with all parties to ensure that they're part of the solution. You have to make everybody believe it was their solution.

How important is it that everyone can see their concerns and needs reflected in the solutions?

If you map out the negotiating positions parties have when they go into a negotiation, it quite often looks like there's no common ground. You can think, “there's no way we can reach an agreement on this in practice.”

One of the important roles of a President, a chair or a facilitator is to get parties to talk about what's possible. This must focus on how to bridge those disagreements in order to create a space where a compromise is possible. 

Part of the role of a good Presidency is to help parties collectively understand where the common ground could be

The tactics parties play in the negotiations can be quite tough. They can maintain a strong position until the very end. But if you've got a good understanding of what everyone needs and you’ve got a good dialogue going, it's much easier to find that space for compromises with them when you come to the crunch point at the end of a conference.

A compromise is never perfect. For many, it’s a step on a journey. They’ll say, “I still don’t have what I need, but we'll use this and we'll go forward from here.” It's about finding a way that ensures everybody has enough of what they need to accept the compromise. 

I remember after the Paris Agreement, an important party in the process had laid out ten things they wanted in the negotiations. “In fact,” a member of that party told me later, “there were only four of them which were really important for us, and you worked out what they were.” So parties come into a negotiation asking a lot more than they really need to reach a compromise.

The sense that there's no space for compromises is often because parties are in a tactical positioning. Part of the role of a good Presidency is to help parties collectively understand where the common ground could be and then to build it.

How do you map out different positions — and distinguish the important demands from the less important ones — in practice?

You get a lot of background material. Parties make submissions when they go into a formal process, such as their intended nationally determined contributions (NDCs) and mitigation targets. You've also got speeches by ministers and chief negotiators in various meetings. All of that's fairly straightforward, most of it is positioning. They tell you what they want you to hear. The question is: what does someone need? 

France has a very extensive diplomatic network with embassies in most countries around the world. When we were organising COP21 in Paris, we used this network extensively to analyse what was going on in a given country. 

A good Presidency, and a good President, will spend a lot of time ahead of the COP just listening to as many parties as possible to understand what they need

We were getting regular reports back from embassies around the world who had been talking to ministers, government officials, parliamentarians, businesses and civil society. So you get a range of perspectives, and you start to understand the interests and needs that lie behind the positioning. Getting into that is not straightforward.

Ultimately, there’s always the risk you misjudge things. That's when simply talking to people is one of the best approaches. A good Presidency, and a good President, will spend a lot of time ahead of the COP just listening to as many parties as possible to understand what they need.

As an example, the French Presidency had four ambassadors whose job it was to travel to different regions of the world and meet as many countries at as high a level as possible in the year ahead of COP21. Parties always greatly appreciate when you show up in their country to listen. You get a much clearer idea of what people really need from those conversations.

I'm very conscious that many presidencies don't have as wide and extensive a diplomatic network as France had in 2015. That can't always be duplicated. But you can always talk to people. You can always listen to them. There's no absolute science to working out what someone needs. It’s always an art.

This amount of diplomatic work must require a strong team. What does a good Presidency team look like? 

The first thing is getting people to work as a single team. We had two years to prepare ourselves for hosting COP21 in December 2015. Most of our team was in place by September 2014.

In the years before COP21, we were quite often duplicating ourselves across the Environment and Foreign Ministries, with people doing the same briefing on both sides. 

When we were preparing COP21, we brought them all together in a single place as part of a single team. They still had their attachment to their original ministries but they worked together as a team. 

Getting people to work as one team helped prevent internal fights. You always get personal conflicts, that’s unavoidable, but it's something you have to manage as you move forward.

We also brought in people from the Finance Ministry, the Agriculture Ministry and a number of other agencies. Some people were the core team and others were part-time, joining at different times to strengthen and to support. 

We structured that into two broad categories: one focusing on the logistics of the negotiations and the other on the substance of negotiations. It enabled those focusing on the substance not to have to worry about things like whether there were enough chairs in the meeting rooms.

So we centralised a single set of instructions, mandates and briefings. We had a team focused on negotiations (which I led), a team focused on diplomacy, a team focused on the action agenda and mobilising partners and finally a crosscutting team on finance. Many people served on multiple teams, which helped us build up collective knowledge.

We had people who focused on specific topics or countries. Someone would, for example, focus on what was happening in Brazil. They’d read all the stuff coming from Brazil, across all topics, and then feed back to the relevant people. 

It allowed us to share information better and to collectively analyse the situation. It created a tapestry-type organisation, which I think was a very effective way of working. 

As a Presidency, how do you manage the volume of information you receive?

That’s a good question. I suspect we were slightly overwhelmed by it at times. I certainly didn't try to follow all of it as it came in. The challenge is to have a system where people can get the right information to the right people. 

We had a fairly small team within the diplomatic team that focused on doing a weekly synthesis of updates. This included common messages to send back out to embassies so they had clear and coordinated messages to give to the governments and others they were meeting. 

During the COP itself, we used that team to do a daily summary of the conference — just a few pages of what was happening within the negotiations, what the presidency's outreach had been the previous day, what key messages we were getting, what was happening with all of the action agenda initiatives that had been launched and what the press was saying. It was useful to have that team as a point of contact.

I don’t think there's one single solution. Maybe now you could have a big artificial intelligence machine which could take all this information and turn out a two-page summary. I'd be a bit wary of it inventing things, though!

Not every COP will have a legacy as clear as the Paris Agreement. How can a Presidency think about the legacy they want to build?

Each COP is different. Some conferences have a very clear negotiating mandate to deliver something. In Paris, it was to deliver an international treaty. We don't need to renegotiate a Paris Agreement every year. 

At COP24 in Katowice, the mandate was to reach an agreement on the detailed rulebook for implementing the Paris Agreement. At COP28 in Dubai, it was — above all — to reach agreement on the global stocktake. 

Sometimes a Presidency has to find that opportunity and take advantage of it. You can be opportunistic and find a way to deliver something that wasn’t necessarily expected at that conference

Other COPs have less clear key outcomes set out in advance. COP27 in Sharm el-Sheikh, for example, was rather a stepping stone as we headed towards COP28 in Dubai. Still, COP27 delivered a really big outcome by deciding to create a fund on loss and damage. That wasn't an expected outcome. It became an opportunity for the Presidency to push forward and get agreement on.  

Sometimes a Presidency has to find that opportunity and take advantage of it. You can be opportunistic and find a way to deliver something that wasn't necessarily expected at that conference. 

Another example was the COP in Glasgow in 2021. It was still in the middle of COVID, after two years of lockdown. People were wearing masks and socially distancing. 

It was an opportunity to put multilateralism back on the map, which I think was very important at that moment. It also had a relatively light negotiating agenda. The Presidency put emphasis on the action agenda, on the delivery of different announcements from the summit of heads of state at the start, and on other initiatives which have led to breakthroughs in industry, finance and other sectors. 

The Presidency very cleverly pushed those forward by emphasising them and communicating clearly. It sent a clear message that the COP itself — not necessarily just the negotiating outcomes, but the global community — was working on solutions together. 

The COP28 Presidency also put a huge effort into its announcements throughout the conference in Dubai. They had a strong communications team that packaged the messages and made them visible. You need to communicate because most people don't go to a COP. They read about it in the press, see it on social media or watch it on television.

I think the risk of that approach is that it can be a bit too “scattergun”. You get so many things going on that it can become difficult to read. And unless you really follow it up, there's a risk of it being seen as a series of announcements which are not necessarily credible. I think there's a challenge for upcoming presidencies to put more credibility and organisation into that process, because I think we still need it.

What advice would you give to upcoming COP Presidencies?

The first advice is to try to simplify the multilateral process. I think we've put too many things on the agenda and the process is overly heavy.

I think the Presidency and the chairs of the subsidiary bodies — who have a very important role in running this process — should start to think with parties about how to rationalise that a bit so we don't deal with everything every year. 

Instead, we can plan things over several years. That’ll allow us to give time to the right things and work on them in a more effective way. I think we're losing a bit of control of that process. 

The second is that cooperation and collaboration really matter as we move into implementation. We need to be increasingly focused on the barriers to implementation. That includes derisking access to finance for many developing countries, collaborating on technologies and strengthening capacities. It's those practical issues that we really need to work on now. 

Strengthening implementation and delivery is a real opportunity for the next few presidencies

The Paris Agreement is now entering its full implementation phase. The transparency system is getting underway. Parties will be reviewed on their reporting and so forth. That gives confidence to everybody that people are moving forward and doing what they said they would do. 

I think there's a real scope for presidencies to use their own initiative to drive this forward. As a Presidency, you've got a platform of several tens of thousands people who come into a COP. Use the platform you have to really drive implementation, drive collaboration, see what's working and push where it's needed. 

That's where the solutions are now. Strengthening implementation and delivery is a real opportunity for the next few presidencies.