By Beatriz Lima Ribeiro, Indiana University Bloomington, United States
In this essay, I explore the connection between two key global environmental forums: UNFCCC Conference of the Parties 28 (COP 28) and CBD Conference of the Parties 15 (COP 15). Despite their shared United Nations affiliation and operational similarities, there’s a noticeable gap in the discussions that occur between the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) and the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). Recently, however, we’ve seen efforts to bridge these gaps in more current documents and different actors that have been navigating both spaces. Debates on the definition of nature and environmental management persist in both COPs, which influences the framing of topics in their produced documents and subsequent policies promoted at the national and regional levels. The CBD and UNFCCC are mutually informed, sharing connections among participating organizations and individuals, financial resources, and the procedural rules typical of United Nations processes. While both conventions operate under a common UN framework, their operationalization of rules diverge, and have different ramifications on how they function. Climate change and biodiversity loss are concepts that together contribute to a globalized definition of “nature” and the strategies for its management. Nevertheless, the impact of these framings on environmental governance and the identification of priority biomes for addressing climate change or biodiversity loss varies significantly, between CBD and UNFCCC. This disparity arises from the historical and material conditions shaping knowledge production in the realms of climate and biodiversity discourse and practice.
A Climate COP in the Desert
I arrived in Dubai to stay at a hostel close to a metro station. One of my first conversations upon my arrival was with another guest. When he asked me why I was in Dubai, I told him “To attend COP 28.” He knew generally what I was talking about, since the whole city had COP 28 advertisements across the airport, metro stations, and malls. He was there on vacation to visit the different Emirates within the United Arab Emirates (UAE). Then, suddenly, he says, “I don’t believe in climate change, the planet’s climate changes naturally, like the ice age for example.” That was an ironic but fitting anecdote to the start of my fieldwork, as climate change is a topic that sparks variable discourses.
COP 28 was conducted in Expo City, a venue on the outskirts of Dubai. Expo City was a curated space, futuristic in its architecture, a so-called green venue that was accessed by public transportation, and a “multicultural” environment built for hosting global events. The host country has praise for an ideal humanist futurism, where technology was presented as a main solution for adaptation to climate change, and the example was the city of Dubai itself. The desert city, marketed as “City of the future”, has across its borders demonstrations of a technological and wealthy existence despite the challenges of its weather and environment. At the same time, contrasting positions are present at COPs where Indigenous peoples, youth, women, and environmental activists push against further mercantilization of nature and advocate for alternative ways of being and relating to nature.
With that said, COPs are multifaceted experiences. It can be an exhausting process with an overwhelming period of adaptation to its pace. I found myself among a magnitude of people, many events, and pollution of the senses. It is busy, loud, and fast. There may be an event at one of the many Pavilions at a certain time, then a negotiation session that is on the other side of the venue. During COP 28, it seemed that these elements were maximized in comparison to previous COPs. 85,000 participants gathered at Expo City, everyone always on the way to different negotiation sessions, events, and meetings. It attracts a lot of media attention, including criticism for its spectacularizing effect, and is discredited by certain groups, who, similarly to my hostel colleague, consider climate change a fallacy.
Navigating Bureaucratic Conservation
In contrast, the Convention of Biological Diversity Conference of the Parties tends to be much smaller, with less media focus and expanded Pavilion sections. When chatting with a few individuals that have attended both Climate COPs and CBD COPs in the past, I often heard that CBD COP was “the boring one.” When I came back to read my field notes of COP 15 (Montréal 2022), I saw that I shared some of that opinion. This was mainly because the event was highly technical and focused intensely on document-making negotiations. Side events and the rushed and busy Pavilion space at Climate COPs were not a “distraction” there. That isn’t to say that there aren’t people that follow the negotiations closely in climate COPs, but in Montréal that seemed to be the norm. Most people at the CBD COP were highly engaged in the negotiations, and especially at COP 15 for what would later become the Kunming-Montréal Convention. This made my first experience at this type of event more challenging and overwhelming in a different way. I needed to get in a space and temporality that required hours of sitting down looking at a screen, following a projected document being edited live. Some terms are more controversial than others, with phrases revised over and over, which meant that occasionally it would take hours to get through one page of the text. Footnotes become a focal point as the aesthetics of a document become disputed – they are read less and of less “importance” than the main text, but a footnote can be negotiated as a concession and will be considered part of the text, just in another position.
Although governed by a similar set of rules and institutionalized practices in the negotiations, each Convention Body (CBD or UNFCCC) and their Conferences of the Parties have developed differently and end up operating differently. This is linked to the history of how global environmental governance has developed in the first place, with different ramifications when we compare climate change vs. biodiversity, the production of knowledge, and finally policymaking. In the case of biodiversity, the number of protected areas has increased considerably since the last decades of the 20th century (IPBES 2019) , when transnational policies with western models of conservation were transferred to areas in the Global South. Much of this land includes “biodiversity hotspots” located within Indigenous and local communities’ lands. In the name of conservation, many of these policies have excluded these communities from their traditional lands and have commodified Indigenous and local knowledge through the lens of a green capitalism and top-down approaches to sustainable development. The differences between these different, but related, bodies of knowledge (biodiversity and climate) have influenced the way in which governance has developed. I argue that knowledge about biodiversity and conservation practices are materially and locally based; climate change, on the other hand, has developed as a body of knowledge that speaks to a more abstract and systemic issue that is globally framed but for a long time, locally diffused.
Bridging
Scientific research on climate change has been pioneered primarily by the atmospheric sciences, which concluded that the use of fossil fuels since the Industrial Revolution has altered the climate through human action. Predicted outcomes like rising global temperature, glaciers melting, and rising sea levels are often viewed in the abstract, removed from local and contextual scenarios. However, current disputed discourses at COP 28 question the effects that climate change has on different groups in different parts of the globe. This is brought by different groups that highlight how colonialism contextualizes and influences the outsized way in which Indigenous peoples, island peoples, farmers, and people of the Global South more generally experience the effects of climate change.
On the other hand, discussions about conservation, biodiversity, and the effects of deforestation are more palpable, with immediate, clear effects on the biomes that have become “hotspots”of conservation. Indigenous peoples living in these “hotspots” have been more involved in the global discussions of conservation than climate change, at least to some extent. In 1996, the International Indigenous Forum on Biodiversity (IIFB) was created and has a space for a collective of representatives that “facilitate and support the full and effective participation of Indigenous peoples in the CBD” . Although the UNFCCC was launched in 1992, it took until 2008 for the institutional recognition and establishment of the International Indigenous People’s Forum on Climate Change (IIPFCC). These disparities revolve around the material and historical contexts in which scientific and discursive frameworks concerning climate change and biodiversity loss evolved, shaping distinct policy approaches.
Despite these differences, both bodies constitute a system of global environmental governance. They build a global body of knowledge and practice towards nature, its temporality, aesthetics, and management. In a way, global environmental governance finds its locality in the institutionalization of a set of rules and practices that aim to tackle global challenges. We need to perceive these spaces as intricately interlinked components of a bureaucratic framework, influenced by the sovereignty of nation-states and the dominance of Western scientific paradigms. There is a need to localize and contextualize global discussions in a manner that acknowledges and addresses the legacy of colonialism on the effects of climate change and biodiversity loss. Above all, it’s crucial to acknowledge that the current effects stem from a violent history of disproportionate resource extraction, exploitation, and genocidal practices intertwined with the legacies of colonialism and capitalism. Taking this history into account, and the role of social sciences in studying these spaces, is essential for breaking the silos of knowledge making and bureaucratic production in the separation between CBD and UNFCCC.
As an anthropologist, I reflect on the space of ethnography in the circumscribed space of a document-driven meeting. It is common to see analysis of these meetings as a space of performativity, and because of their slow pace in providing significant solutions to global environmental problems, some see the process of document making in itself as a facade, where the true action would happen behind the curtains of such spectacle. Although I agree that there are definitely elements of performance, not considering the central role that documents possess is misleading. Many actors direct energy, resources and political strategy to influence the content of these documents as they engage in the institutional structures in intergovernmental governance spaces. Documents are made by people, are disputed by them, and are an outcome that is further managed after the meetings are over. At the same time, the strategies and actions taken by different groups go beyond the institutionalized spaces of negotiations, pointing out to the creative ways in which action happens beyond institutional rules. A systematic comprehension of these structures combined with the in-betweens that an ethnographic look provides helps to reveal the assumptions of how global environmental governance functions and may shed light on the intricacies that make each meeting unique.
The study of international organizations and global governance events, such as the United Nations and its satellite institutions, brings up the challenges of “studying up” as it engages with complex networks of power. In highly institutionalized settings, ethnography helps us look beyond formal rules and observe how people navigate these systems with specific interests and political agendas, bridge spaces (such as CBD and UNFCCC), and work around rules that may limit participation of non-state actors. Following Brazilian anthropologist Marisa Peirano, ethnography constitutes more than a methodology, it has its own way of building knowledge. The ethnographic practice of estrangement (Peirano 2014) helps us ask “how” and “why” these bureaucracy-mediated spaces can be put into perspective, into estrangement, and denormalized.
In the discussion presented in this essay, both meetings under the CBD and UNFCCC systems are under similar institutionalized rules, but have historically developed differently. Ethnography then is a way of looking at the particularities of each, what and how actors end up participating, and the influence of how the “daily life” of a meeting can affect its outcomes in the long run. In that sense, the ethnographer may connect the micro elements of an event that, in its organization, create a unique experience of spatiality and temporality, with the macro ways in which the meetings and their immediate outcomes, documents, reproduce power imbalances and stagnation in acting towards just and effective solutions for climate change and biodiversity conservation. Moreover, ethnography provides an opportunity to analyze the similarities but also the gaps between the CBD and UNFCCC systems that speak to ways the “environment” is framed as a governable asset.
References
IPBES. 2019. Global assessment report on biodiversity and ecosystem services of the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services. E. S. Brondizio, J. Settele, S. Díaz, and H. T. Ngo (Editors). IPBES secretariat, Bonn, Germany. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.3831673
Peirano, Mariza. 2014. Etnografia não é método. Horizontes Antropológicos, 20: 377-391.
Beatriz Lima Ribeiro earned a B.A. in Social Sciences and a M.A. in Social Anthropology at University of Brasília, Brazil. She is currently a PhD Candidate in the Department of Anthropology at Indiana University Bloomington, United States. She has been conducting fieldwork in different UNFCCC and CBD meetings looking at the historical and present organization of Indigenous people’s participation in global environmental governance.
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