How Effective Negotiation Management Promotes Multilateral Cooperation

The power of process in climate, trade, and biosafety negotiations

Kai Monheim

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781317632078
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Économie
• Subtopic: Développement durable

Multilateral negotiations on worldwide challenges have grown in importance with rising global interdependence. Yet, they have recently proven slow to address these challenges successfully. This book discusses the questions which have arisen from the highly varying results of recent multilateral attempts to reach cooperation on some of the critical global challenges of our times. These include the long-awaited UN climate change summit in Copenhagen, which ended without official agreement in 2009; Cancún one year later, attaining at least moderate tangible results; the first salient trade negotiations after the creation of the WTO, which broke down in Seattle in 1999 and were only successfully launched in 2001 in Qatar as the Doha Development Agenda; and the biosafety negotiations to address the international handling of Living Modified Organisms, which first collapsed in 1999, before they reached the Cartagena Protocol in 2000. Using in-depth empirical analysis, the book examines the determinants of success or failure in efforts to form regimes and manage the process of multilateral negotiations.

The book draws on data from 62 interviews with organizers and chief climate and trade negotiators to discover what has driven delegations in their final decision on agreement, finding that with negotiation management, organisers hold a powerful tool in their hands to influence multilateral negotiations.

This comprehensive negotiation framework, its comparison across regimes and the rich and first-hand empirical material from decision-makers make this invaluable reading for students and scholars of politics, international relations, global environmental governance, climate change and international trade, as well as organizers and delegates of multilateral negotiations.

This research has been awarded the German Mediation Scholarship Prize for 2014 by the Center for Mediation in Cologne.

1 The argument How negotiation management alters multilateral cooperation

DOI: 10.4324/9781315757070-1

This book proposes that negotiation management may influence the course of multilateral negotiations. The first chapter lays out a framework for analysing multilateral negotiations and details the elements of negotiation management. The chapter finally sketches the research approach for those readers interested in the methodology underlying this book. I also shed some light on the exciting research journey to collect data from 62 lead practitioners of climate and trade negotiations from around the world. Overall, it provides a first idea of how this book refines and complements current insights on negotiations and multilateral cooperation.

The argument

In order to analyse comprehensively to what extent negotiation management explains the outcomes of multilateral negotiations on climate change, trade, and biosafety I suggest a comprehensive negotiation framework, which goes beyond mere structural approaches. This responds to the call of scholarship on multilateral cooperation to abandon overly parsimonious approaches (Keohane and Victor 2011; Mitchell 2010; Touval 2010; Woolcock 2011b). I rather acknowledge regime theory’s finding that a multivariate approach best accumulates explanatory power (Osherenko and Young 1993; Underdal 2002): there is a ‘need to look more at the process (“the how”) as scholars have so far more focused on the conditions of regime creation (“the why”)’ (Jönsson 2002).

Falkner, for example, argues that the several perspectives of constructivism on discourse and of rationalist theories on structure and leadership only jointly explain agreement on the Cartagena Protocol on Biosafety (Falkner 2009). Similarly, Odell regrets the lacking integration of negotiation analysis, international political economy, and constructivism, and the ‘still primitive’ knowledge about international organization negotiations (Odell 2010: 628). With his synthesis of structure and process, Odell had earlier discovered process influence in the outcomes of ten bilateral economic negotiations (Odell 2000). A recent compendium of environmental regime creation confirms the trend towards process by distinguishing between structure, process, and institutional provisions (Mitchell 2010: ch. 5). This negotiation framework therefore integrates structural and process explanations (Figure 1.1).

Figure 1.1 Negotiation management as additional independent variable

Let us turn to the argument underlying the framework, which holds that the effective management of a multilateral negotiation by the organizers increases the probability of an agreement (Hypothesis 1, Figure 1.2): negotiation management is considered

Figure 1.2 Effective negotiation management increases the probability of an agreement

effective when negotiations are transparent and inclusive (Hypothesis 1.1), when organizers are highly capable (Hypothesis 1.2), when the lead organizer enjoys high authority (Hypothesis 1.3), and when the negotiation mode of arguing prevails (Hypothesis 1.4).¹ Let us explain this argument in more detail.

¹ The entire year of the Mexican Presidency of the UN climate negotiations before and during the Cancún summit is defined as one multilateral negotiation, for example. The organizers are the lead officials of the host country and of the treaty Secretariat.

Negotiated agreement as potential outcome

The outcome (or dependent variable) of such a round of multilateral negotiations is negotiated agreement. One successful example for such a ‘negotiated agreement’ of the climate change regime was the Kyoto Protocol, or with a much lower degree of commitment to action the Cancún Agreements. As an alternative to ‘negotiated agreement’, one could have chosen ‘failure/success’ or ‘outcome efficiency’ as variables to judge the outcome of multilateral negotiations. However, these are often subjective and blurry criteria, and thus not very helpful for a clear-cut analysis. A few people consider Copenhagen a ‘success’, while most perceive of it as a ‘failure’. The determination of the efficiency of a negotiation outcome can also be a highly imprecise exercise. This approach may be possible for analysing negotiations on European integration, for example, that involve a limited number of parties and issues (Moravcsik 1999: 271). Yet, multilateral climate summits are much more complex. The attribution of weights to preferences on countless issues for over 190 countries would be a misleading simplification. Instead, the use of ‘negotiated agreement’ mirrors a less nuanced but more reliable frequent practice by researchers (Albin and Young 2012; Bernauer and Mitchell 2004: 95; Odell 2009).

Negotiation management as key factor

So, which drivers make a negotiated agreement more, or less, likely? The central argument of this book is that one key factor is the way in which these multilateral negotiations are managed. More precisely, the organizers of multilateral negotiations hold four key levers in their hands,² which are primarily influenced by the organizers, and not by negotiating countries – the process influence of delegations mostly depends on their interests and power and is thus accounted for by these structural explanations anyway (Young 1994: 152).

² These factors clearly stood out from myriad negotiation management factors in the scholarship on regimes, discourse, agency, and fair process, and in the exploratory interviews in Cancún. To be clear: this research considered myriad other variables. Each of the 62 climate and trade negotiation expert interviewees was queried on the influence of variables in addition to those hypothesized. Their answers are analysed under alternative explanations and may well rise to importance. Nevertheless, a controlled comparison demands to focus on a selection of variables. Those included in the framework stood out clearly from scholarship and the exploratory research phase.

Transparency and inclusiveness

Recent scholarship on economic and environmental regimes has increasingly emphasized how greater transparency and inclusiveness facilitate negotiations (Davenport et al. 2012: 45, 53; Müller 2011; Odell 2009: 284). A study on WTO negotiations in Cancún and Geneva in 2003 and 2004 discovered influence on an agreement through transparency, fair representation, fair treatment, and voluntary agreement (Albin and Young 2012: 46–8). Delegates expect respect for ground rules of UN diplomacy, although climate, trade, and biosafety negotiations are less institutionalized than EU decision making for instance (e.g. for economic diplomacy see Woolcock 2011a: 15–17), and thus have less detailed provisions on the required kind of negotiation process. Practitioners of the biosafety negotiations shared these findings (Köster 2002; Mayr 2002). The evidence collected in this book will examine the effect of transparency and inclusiveness on agreement probability.

What indicates transparency and inclusiveness of a negotiation (Figure 1.3)?³ Information management on small group negotiations is a first aspect of transparency. These often consist of only 20 to 60 delegates and play a central role in reducing the complexity of parties and issues. Since the small group frequently addresses core areas, it becomes vital how well organizers inform the thousands of excluded delegates about its mandate, schedule, and participants. Transparency also varies with the handling of compromise text, which is meant to satisfy the key positions of as many countries as possible after endless negotiations. Given this text’s importance, how broadly organizers inform about its origin, evolution, and conclusion becomes crucial. Transparency finally depends on how diligently organizers update parties on the overall negotiation progress and schedule. As thousands of negotiators are scattered over myriad formal and informal groups, hardly anyone has a grasp of all key moves.

³ This process element refers to all negotiating parties, as major powers often enjoy more transparency and inclusiveness.

Figure 1.3 Indicators for transparency and inclusiveness

Small group negotiations are also a first indicator of inclusion. Countries want to participate in these salient meetings or at least be represented by their coalition members, which renders its selection process decisive. Second, negotiations occur across several levels, from experts up to heads of state and government. The integration of levels affects how expert negotiators and politicians perceive their inclusion. Third, organizers engage in extensive deliberation on parties’ positions and solutions: how broadly do they reach out to countries to consider their views when facilitating compromise? Finally, the framing of a process as transparent and inclusive influences the perception of parties.

These indicators assess transparency and inclusiveness in relative terms by contrasting two negotiations in the same field, like Copenhagen and Cancún. A binary way qualification is unfeasible as complex multilateral negotiations are rarely fully transparent and inclusive (or not): ‘Parties never know all that happens.’⁴ A small group that excludes thousands of negotiators can never be considered fully transparent and inclusive. Nonetheless, informing diligently about the group’s details and allocating membership through an accepted process enhances its transparency and inclusiveness...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Series Page
• Fm-Chapter1
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Fm-Chapter2
• Contents
• List of Figures and Tables
• List of abbreviations
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 The argument How negotiation management alters multilateral cooperation
• 2 The fall and rise of climate negotiations From Copenhagen to Cancún
• 3 Negotiation management during the Danish and Mexican Presidencies
• 4 Explanations of climate outcomes beyond negotiation management
• 5 Trade negotiations The bedevilled launch of the Doha Development Agenda
• 6 Biosafety negotiations The rocky path to the Cartagena Protocol
• 7 Conclusion
• Appendix I Main features of the Copenhagen Accord and Cancún Agreements
• Appendix II Questionnaire to organizers of the UNFCCC negotiations
• Appendix III Interview list on climate negotiations
• Appendix IV Questionnaire to delegates of the WTO trade negotiations
• Appendix V Interview list on trade negotiations
• Index