Civil society voice must be heard in climate talks

Gita Parihar

09 June 2011

As I type this on a German summer's evening, the memory of being "kettled" by UN Security police on a dark December evening in Copenhagen two years ago, along with the rest of the FOEI delegation, seems a distant one. Hopefully, as a result of today's participation workshop, it will become an increasingly irrelevant reminder of the bad old days.

Anyone who has ever attended a meeting of the UNFCCC will have been struck by what a secretive process it is, how often sessions take place which are closed to the public, how few opportunities there are for civil society to speak in the process and how any interventions have to be approved by the secretariat beforehand. If you want to carry out an "action" as a way of commenting on the process (for example depicting parties as school kids, some of whom are failing to take sufficient action on climate change) then you have to persuade the secretariat that your action falls outside their very broad definition of harassment. If you are a member of southern civil society organisation, your access to the negotiations may well be impeded by the financial cost of going to the meetings, difficulties in obtaining visas and also difficulties on the basis of language- many UNFCCC meetings are conducted only in English with no translation.

These and similar issues were discussed at the participation workshop today. Civil society came up with a range of shared and imaginative ways of solving the problems, including by pointing to best practice in other areas such as under the Aarhus Convention. A presentation by Pablo Salon of the Bolivian delegation highlighted the need for states to ask themselves searching questions about how they ensure that they represent all of the groups that they should, including the marginalised sections of society that remain at the fringe of the negotiations. As he pointed out, if the process is not fit for purpose then there is no point in our being here. And as ambassador D'Alba of Mexico said there is no need for "policemen" at the door of UNFCCC meeting rooms, especially when the default position in other UN processes is that meetings are open to observers. Parties also supported the need to allow civil society a greater ability to comment during sessions.

The clear message from the workshop was that civil society belongs at the negotiations- they are the lifeblood of the process, not only providing expertise but giving it legitimacy. Needless restrictions on their ability to engage must be removed so that, instead of being a sad example of what not to do, the UNFCCC can become a leading light, showing others how it should and can be done.