6 A Thrice-Told Tale of Negotiations
Naveeda Khan · Fordham University Press eBooks · 2023
There was a lot of buildup to COP24 in Katowice, Poland, in 2018.After the PA had been ratified in Paris, negotiating the rules for its implementation started at the intersession in Bonn in 2016 and had carried on through an additional intersession in Bangkok added to the calendar and scheduled for just a few months before COP24 to hasten pro gress.The rules of implementation, previously called the Paris Rulebook, had to be adopted at COP24, according to the terms of the PA.One thing I had learned by observing this pro cess was that deadlines were met even if the ensuing actions or products were hollow.In Katowice, witnessing the Polish government's very vis i ble suppression of civil society organ izations, Nathan Thanki, the or ga nizer of DCJ and a veteran of the pro cess, summed it up as an indication of the Polish COP Presidency's determination to deliver on the rules.He even speculated that the suppressions were spectacles to throw activists off the scent of the heavy-handed mea sures the Polish Presidency intended to take within the negotiation pro cess to bring about a decisive outcome at the meeting, which was being billed as "Paris 2.0."For Poland to deliver the rules would be no small mea sure of the successful leadership of the COP and demonstrate that a Party could achieve results without too much diplomacy, as vaunted by the French.Developing countries were increasingly worried that the Paris Agreement was created to set aside the KP and even perhaps the Convention.Pre-2020 conversations were not progressing, and it did not look like enough countries would ratify the KP for a second commitment period.They fretted that CBDR, the one princi ple within the Convention where questions of historical responsibility, 6A Thrice-Told Tale of Negotiations