beyond coalitions: small states in climate negotiations – beCoSSClimate

To address our three research question, we combine quantitative and qualitative data and methods. Broadly speaking, we use quantitative data and methods to examine small states’ presence and participation, and qualitative data and methods to detect influence.

In a first phase of the project, we have created two large databases: one on presence in the climate negotiations, and one on participation. Both datasets rely on various data sources, mainly from the UNFCCC Secretariat, cover all 197 Parties to the Convention (including the United States that no longer is a Party), and all climate meetings between 1995 and 2024, including both the larger Conferences of the Parties (COP), and the more technical Subsidiary Bodies meetings.

We started with data on presence to understand which Parties (large and small) send delegates to the climate meetings – and more importantly, who these delegates are. In a second step, we created a participation index, covering six different negotiation activities, such as speaking up in debates but also for instance holding press conferences.

In the second phase of the project, we focus on influence, using qualitative case studies. Using the results of our quantitative analysis as starting points, we seek to contextualise and better understand certain aspects of participation, and in particular link participation to influence (both over the negotiation process and its outcomes). These case studies mainly rely on participant observation at climate negotiatons as well as interviews with negotiators, diplomats, and other experts of the climate negotiations.

While research is ongoing, we have already obtained some interesting results, in particular with regard to presence and participation.

First, on presence, our research confirms that smaller states tend to send fewer delegates, because of more limited human, financial, and diplomatic capacities. Yet, we also clearly see in our data that it is crucial to look beyond delegation size and focus on delegation composition, that is, pay attention to who the delegates are. Thus, we find that even small delegations can play an important role – when they have the ‘right’ people, those with experience and skills. In addition, smaller delegations are more likely to recruit external experts into their delegations that can provide support and boost negotiation capacity.

Second, our participation index reveals that Parties engage in a broad range of activities. While participation in oral debates unsurprisingly dominates, we also witness the growing importance of non-negotiation spaces and activities like press conferences and side events. These non-negotiation spaces seem to complement the negotiation space, as Parties that are actively engaged in the negotiations are also those who engage most strongly in non-negotiation activities. In contrast, Parties that are silent in the negotiations themselves are also passive in the non-negotiation space.

We find that presence matters for participation: Parties with smaller delegations are overall less actively involved in the negotiations. Yet, as above, when sending the ‘right’ people, even small Parties can actively engage – and sometimes even exert influence.

One case where we see surprising influence is that of Iceland, a very small state in Northern Europe. Despite its small size and limited diplomatic capacities, Iceland was very active in the early years of negotiations. Iceland played an outsized role in obtaining an exception under the Kyoto Protocol – the so-called ‘Icelandic exception’. Yet, this diplomatic success required substantial resources, and therefore is not a sustainable negotiation strategy for small states.

In the second half of the project, we will focus on (i) concluding the quantitative analyses, and (ii) carrying out several qualitative case studies. The aim is to examine the links between the different elements of influence, that is, understand whether, and if so, how, presence affects participation, and participation affects influence.

Our participation index provides very rich data that invites further exploitation. For example, we are examining the links between presence and participation: do delegations that include for instance a minister or president convene more press conferences? Similarly, our quantitative data and first results call for more in-depth study of both, subsets of Parties, and subsets of activities. For instance, why do some Parties send strong delegations, but remain silent in the negotiations? What happens if the most senior negotiator in a small delegation takes on a chairing position and thus supposedly becomes neutral?

To address these questions, we continue our participation in climate meetings, having attended both COP29 and COP30. In addition, we are at the moment conducting interviews with different negotiators and other stakeholders.

Finally, we started to present first results, both to different academic audiences and to the general public, and expect to continue this engagement. Thus, we expect to disseminate results through presentations at various academic conferences, additional academic journal articles, as well as commentary for a general audience,

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.