Lessons from Geneva to understand and even appreciate Copenhagen?

The recent climate summit in Copenhagen has given way to widespread disappointment: a global audience had high hopes for a breakthrough. Yet the preliminary results from our research group’s participant observation at WIPO in Geneva would indicate that the climate summit, preceded by preparatory intergovernmental meetings beforehand, certainly did achieve what Barak Obama called “meaningful and unprecedented breakthrough.” For unlike many international negotiations, there *is* an outcome.
The pictures available from the Copenhagen summit (see for example here, here, here and here) are eerily familiar from our participant observation in Geneva. Other than the images showing world leaders addressing the summit or dining together in animated conversation, we get to see chairs and tables organized alphabetically by country names, all facing forward and delegates whose bodies signal boredom and exhaustion.
Protesters outside the summit halls and commentators near and far spend no time thinking about the culture of international negotiations, manifest in the meeting spaces, communicative rules and their traditionalization, the linguistic diversity and corresponding need for countless interpreters, the equally traditionalized open and latent groups and subgroups with their complex agenda. These are just some of the factors contributing to the nature of what anthropologist William Fisher called some time ago the “chaotic, public spectacle” of international meetings and conferences. Within these parameters, the IGC we have been studying has, in eight years of twice annual meetings made practically no headway concerning its actual mission – negotiating regulations for GRTKF.
One of its few breakthroughs has been the establishment of a voluntary fund for delegates from indigenous groups and NGOs to travel to attend the IGC. We have observed speeding and stalling practices, deep engagement in the collective micro-editing of potential negotiation texts – in short, repeat engagements on the part of more than two hundred delegates where not speed but at best incremental movements are the rule rather than the exception.
Cultural property is a relatively young negotiation subject, tough it has arisen, globally, in quite diverse form over a long period of time. Similarly, climate change has unfolded over a century or more, but it has been a burning issue on the global agenda for at best a decade. While the result of the Copenhagen summit is also the decision for a “fund”, it is a fund that addresses the problem under negotiation directly. Judging by the outcome, climate change is regarded internationally as a far more crucial issue than the regulation of cultural property rights. Perhaps we should be thankful for that, as increased effort to address or even halt climate change will give us more time to work toward insights and solutions in the realm of cultural property right

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