By Jivan Sobrinho-Wheeler
So the night before last the Brazilian government came up with a new negotiating text, and from now on they will be chairing the negotiations. Being the host country has its perks. The consensus seems to be that the new version isn’t terrible but it leaves out a lot of important stuff, like an Ombudperson for Future Generations.
The interesting part is that the negotiations will no longer be done by going line by line through the text. Comments will be about concepts instead of changing language like “should” to “will” and “technology transfer” to “research into technology, innovation and science.” This means no more brackets. It will be up to the chair to decide what the important points of consensus or disagreement are, and to incorporate those into a new text.
A couple people in the briefing were pretty outspoken that this was the right move. One man said that “forgetfulness” has always played an important part in negotiations. If a suggestion was not echoed or built upon by other delegations, it did not get written down by the chair, and thus did not make it into the new document. But with laptops and [some of the most] recommended projectors, every new suggestion gets typed in and projected for all to see. If countries can’t agree on some language it gets put in brackets, and before long the text is chock full of square parentheses. Going back to the way negotiations were done ten or fifteen years ago delegates to the chair the power of crafting something that will be mutually agreeable. Negotiators register major objections instead of bickering about individual sentences. And in this way the process moves faster.
What are your thoughts about negotiations, the role of the chair, and brackets?
The thing about taking out brackets is that it makes all consultations behind the scenes. The chairs only want to hear consensus, which means that
– any discussions have to take place outside of the negotiating rooms
– many contentious points are still in the text.
In fact several of the key contentious issues have been ‘abandoned’ by the Brazilians in the sense that they have not tried to resolve them: their focus has been taking out the unnecessary. They have decided that they need to be taken up at a higher level, that’s there’s only so much they can do. Starting tomorrow, it’s back to UN rules instead of Brazilian ones, and they will have a lot to tackle.