It’s Conference Season Yet Again!

Image courtesy of [DavidCastilloDominici] at FreeDigitalPhotos.net

It is almost that season of the year: the long awaited season for organizations and institutions whose interests are in the focus areas of climate change and sustainable development. Even though I am new in this field, I know my world too well and more so, the systems that govern the world. In East Africa, which is also part of Sub-Saharan Africa, the rhetoric is no different from the rest of the third world or should we say the most often times politically correct South.

Lobbying is happening big time over who in the office will attend the forthcoming COP in Peru. Friendships are lost and new alliances are formed. Talk of organizational and institutional drama. Now is the time to write a report on the community work you were engaged in to help increase the knowledge of the importance of planting trees in arid and minimally accessible parts of the country. Your boss has to see it but more so the finance and procurement in charge in your office. After all, they hold the fate of how many people will go, so it is a great idea to start showing up.

Then there is the lobbying outside the office. The visit your neighbor to check how they are doing kind of lobbying. Forgetting they have been your neighbors during the year but it did not matter because the stakes were not as high as they are now and the per-diem was not anything as memorable as this one would be. So let us plan a meeting to see what everyone else in the field is planning for the COP. It would be a strategic thing to do seeing as we are most likely going to be asking for sponsorship from the same donor. Voila! , there is tea, snacks, lunch, and four o’clock tea and if we are lucky, we will get to spend 2-3 nights at this fancy hotel. It is important to raise the tree cover in our country to 10 percent after all and it is no joke to do that. There is millions of trees involved here so we need to plan.

Then there is my all-time favorite. “Let’s seek an audience with the government”. They have to listen to us because we are the link between them and the common citizenry. I am not sure how much of these citizens are common in our work but heck it’s the system. It is how it works everywhere in the non-state actor’s world and in the state actors sometimes. We are always caught in the last minute rush almost always. What really is annoying is the fact that the things we schedule as last minutes are those that are very important. I mean, who in this continent does not think climate change is an issue of almost disaster declaration. We are all ok with having these issues as last minute because it is a job for most of us. It is what puts food on our tables and it ends there. It is what has facilitates our middle class crisis kind of life-meet in upscale coffee houses in the evening after office work.

This is what for me defines the double standards that is environmental diplomacy in the world today. It is a soft power diplomacy tool for many states and sometimes non state actors and runs the economies of others. However, it is a principle in the world systems, Lawrence Susskind  well known for trans-boundary environmental negotiations describes this and similar concepts as more likely to be supported by non-state actors because the games are played in the political fields as opposed to apolitical fields. Now that systems have been in place to accommodate such thinking, could there be any idealistic views that can be liberalized to disengage these practices and ideologies? Next, what is the role of non-state actors in international negotiations of climate change?