Negotiations are a Contact Sport … and Contact Sports Need Contact Groups

12 March 2014

We’re pacifists here at ECO, but that doesn’t mean that we don’t have a soft spot for a good game of competitive sport. And just like the race to a low-carbon, climate-safe future, negotiations can be a good game too – of course we expect everyone to be good sportspeople and act in good faith.

ECO remembers our mothers warning – “games ain’t fun without no rules.” It's time that everyone took that advice to heart. For the games to really get started on the comprehensive, fair and legally binding agreement the world needs, we need rules to guide the discussion. Those rules, under UN processes require Parties to form a “contact group” before formal negotiations can begin. ECO suggests this should happen before the half-time break of this Bonn session. In a contact group (open to observers, as the Philippines on behalf of the LMDC have suggested) Parties can tackle unfair proposals and score goals for ambitious and fair solutions.

It seems the crowd of countries cheering for a contact group is wide and growing to include African, Arab, BASIC, LMDC and some of the Pacific SIDS countries. So that leaves a question as to why the Europeans and Brollies, who usually love rules, seem determined to remain stuck in an eternal warm-up of informal consultations?

ECO is peace-loving at heart but we've already enjoyed two years of reflection, with everyone sharing their "feelings", and time is tight. Parties need to kick off the real negotiations, based on text proposals from parties, in the structure of negotiations. ECO is looking forward to reading a record-breaking draft negotiating text (that is not unwieldy as pre-Copenhagen) in Lima.