beyond coalitions: small states in climate negotiations – beCoSSClimate

Small states are often taken to be rule-takers rather than rule-makers in international affairs. Yet, small states can punch above their weight, notably when working through coalitions. While coalitions are key to understanding multilateral negotiations such as those on climate change, they mask important differences within coalitions, where we see similar power dynamics and negotiation asymmetries as in overall negotiations. Who then drives coalition engagement and success, and why are some states more involved than others? Under which conditions are these states, in the coalition and the overall negotiations, successful?
The proposed project – BeCoSS Climate – examines these questions with a focus on small states in the UN climate negotiations. While small states often work through coalitions to overcome their size limitations, we argue that we need to look beyond coalitions to understand influence and power dynamics in multilateral negotiations. Coalitions are a key, but understudied, meso-level of negotiations. Member states are typically extremely diverse, and vary strongly in their negotiation capacity, visibility, and active participation. In the end, it is individual states, if not individual negotiators, that drive coalitions’ activities and success.
We break down influence into four consecutive elements, and hypothesise that being present at multilateral negotiations is a precondition for active participation, which in turn may lead to influence over the negotiation process, and eventually influence over outcomes. Accordingly, we pose three overarching research questions:
1. How present and engaged are different states in multilateral diplomacy?
2. Why do we see this variation in presence and participation?
3. Under which circumstances do presence and participation lead to influence?
We address these questions by analysing UN climate talks, combining quantitative and qualitative approaches. First, we use negotiation documents and descriptive statistics to map variation and change in presence and participation across all states, over time and across agenda items. We devise new ways of measuring presence and participation, beyond the existing literature. This provides us with a fine-grained overview of states that are consistently strongly represented or actively engaged, or states that are only active at certain points in time or on certain issues (Question 1). We then draw on inferential statistics to explain these differences in presence and participation through specific country and issue-level characteristics (Question 2). Finally, we trace ‘moments of influence’ through comparative case studies of small state success in three issue areas: loss and damage, the 1.5° goal, and climate finance, based on ethnographic and interpretive methods, notably collaborative event ethnography, interviews, and process tracing. For these case studies, we specifically focus on small island states, as they collectively had influence in the selected areas in climate negotiations, but how that influence came about, why it varied, and which individual islands drove it, is unknown. The case studies contextualise the explanations found in steps 1 and 2, and help us understand under which circumstances presence and participation translate into influence over process and/or outcomes (Question 3).
We thus systematically evaluate the conditions under which states are present, engaged, and influential in multilateral negotiations. With our focus on small states (especially from the Global South) and our diverse methods, we contribute to debates on the role of small states in global politics, new methods (big data, ethnography) in IR and negotiation research, as well as on practices of negotiations, bridging research in diplomacy studies, negotiation research, and fairness and justice in negotiations.