Democracy

Early in 2014 in a South African journal,The Thinker (Q1, 2014), Thabo Mbeki laid out his vision for the future of the progressive movement in Africa. The core of this agenda, was “establishing genuinely democratic systems of government, including accountable State systems”. He is harsh about the reality of democracy in many African countries in which “State systems have been reduced to a patrimony of a predatory elite, controlled by its self-serving ‘professional political class’” “Thus”, he continues, “does the putative democratic state become a social institution which serves the interests of a ‘rent-seeking’ elite whose goals amount to no more than preserving its political power and using this power to extract the ‘rent’ which ensures its enrichment”

Harsh words indeed, though ones which have become almost a cliché with respect to the governance of many African states. Yet, by an odd coincidence, at around same time, The Economist, august journal of the western business elite, had a front-page splash “What’s gone wrong with democracy?”,[i] the title of a long essay inside which opened by suggesting “that democracy is going through a difficult time. Where autocrats have been driven from office, their opponents have mostly failed to create viable democratic regimes. Even in established democracies, flaws in the system have become worryingly visible and disillusion with politics is rife. Yet a few years ago democracy looked as though it would dominate the world.” The piece ends with the quotation from a past US President often found in The Economist that “democracy never lasts long. It wastes, exhausts and murders itself. There was never a democracy yet that did not commit suicide” John Adams wrote this in 1814 and it is unclear as to precisely what he was referring. There had been a brief flourishing of democratic intent in France a few years before, quickly snuffed out, and there had been the original ‘democracy’ in Athens copied by a few other Greek city-states around the fourth century BC in which, it is believed, around 15% of the population took part. There was, of course, the Roman Republic which we know ended badly on the Ides of March and also the Republic of Geneva about which the less said the better. Adams in fact had precious little evidence on which to base his assertion and, of course, it would not have occurred to him that a country whose franchise excluded all women and those males held in servitude could not be seen as a democracy. Even so, recent history suggests that he had a point given that in 2014 alone, three elected governments were overthrown and replaced by self-appointed cliques.

Doubts about the state of democracy are not confined to right-wing journals. The eminent left historian, Perry Anderson, recently published a coruscating essay mainly about the corruption of Italian democracy but which opened with a lament for European democracy in general.[ii]

Europe is ill. How seriously, and why, are matters not always easy to judge. But among the symptoms three are conspicuous and inter-related. The first, and most familiar, is the degenerative drift of democracy across the continent, ... Referendums are regularly overturned, if they cross the will of the rulers. Voters whose views are scorned by elites shun the assembly that nominally represents them, turnout falling with each successive election... executives domesticate or manipulate legislatures with greater ease; parties lose members; voters lose belief that they count, as political choices narrow and promises of difference on the hustings dwindle or vanish in office.

He continues with a roll-call of distinguished European politicians who have been implicated in various ways in huge corruption scandals amongst them Helmut Kohl, Jacques Chirac, Gerhard Schröder, Horst Köhler (former head of the IMF), Christine Lagarde (current head of the IMF), Bertie Ahern, (past Irish prime-minister), Mariano Rajoy (current Spanish prime-minister) and on through Greece, Turkey and the U.K. The sums involved are not small: Helmut Kohl was found to have amassed some two million Deutschmarks from donors whose names he refused to reveal. Not one of this illustrious roll-call has so far been called to account though Lagarde is currently under criminal investigation, something which seems not to impede her job ruling the global financial system.

Nor is the problem of dynastic political elites any preserve of Africa. Arguably the most important democracy in the world, certainly the largest, is India in which 814 million people went to the polls in May, 2014. These elections were widely publicised as resulting in the overthrow of the Gandhi family which had ruled India for four generations and bringing the Bharatiya Janata Party to power led by a man of humble origins with no family connections to assist him. However, as Patrick French has shown in a recent book, India: a Portrait,[iii] nearly 30% of members of the Indian parliament, the Lok Sabha, were connected directly by family to their political posts whilst, startlingly, all members under 30 were the children of former politicians. There is little sign of voter disillusion with electoral democracy in India with the 2014 election showing the highest ever turnout at 66.4%, a respectably high figure for a country with such a huge, poor rural sector. However, the importance of dynastic connections suggests that even in this vibrant democracy there are some problems.

In the USA, the democratic problem is, as always, money and its connections with power. Efforts to limit the amount of money which individuals or corporations could spend supporting political candidates have been regularly ruled as unconstitutional by the Supreme Court. According to the respected journalist, Gary Younge:

In a system where money is considered speech, and corporations are people, this trend is inevitable. Elections become not a system of participatory engagement determining how the country is run, but the best democratic charade that money can buy. People get a vote; but only once money has decided whom they can vote for and what the agenda should be. The result is a plutocracy that operates according to the golden rule: that those who have the gold make the rules.[iv]

Once, powerful unions were able provide some counterbalancing finance to that of corporate interests. However, the decline of unions and the almost exponential growth in the scale of expenditure on elections have greatly reduced this influence. Even so, American democracy has always been a bit rough-and-ready and tinged with corruption, though the scale of this may be increasing, whilst the very decentralised nature of US politics does provide scope for some genuine democratic initiative.  The real centre of the democratic ‘crisis’ lies in Europe.

It is sometimes forgotten just how recent democracy is in much of Europe and how fractured has been its history. Only Sweden and the UK can really claim to have enjoyed unbroken democratic governance since the late nineteenth century with the gradual extension of the franchise to include women as well as the working class less than a hundred years ago. Even so, the disappearance of fascism from southern Europe in the 1970s followed by the emergence of parliamentary democracy in the Communist countries of Eastern Europe in the 1990s seemed to suggest that this form of governance was inevitable and immutable, so much so that in 1992, Francis Fukuyama was able to pronounce that:

What we may be witnessing is not just the end of the Cold War, or the passing of a particular period of post-war history, but the end of history as such: that is, the end point of mankind's ideological evolution and the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government.[v]

Fukuyama has in recent years rather backtracked from this position but only at the margins despite the conspicuous failure of the efforts of the USA to impose liberal democracy on Iraq and Afghanistan. Why then the sense of a democratic crisis particularly in Europe? In a number of ways it is the culmination of two trends which have been developing for years, indeed decades.

The first is the gradual decline of public involvement and interest in the processes of electoral democracy. The most obvious of these is participation in elections, something which appeared to have stabilised in Europe in a period from the 1950s through to the 1980s at around 80-85%.

 After this decade there was a slow but steady decline throughout Europe, something which seems to have accelerated into this century. In 2001, the UK had the lowest turnout since the advent of mass democracy whilst France fell to a record low of 60.4% in 2007. A raft of other countries, including Ireland, Norway, Portugal, Spain and Finland, have also recorded record lows. A second indicator of decline in involvement is increasing voting volatility, which is the number of voters who shift their party preferences around from election to election. This lack of stability in voting preference suggests disillusion with the democratic process. A third and in some ways the most significant, has been a major decline in the membership of political parties. The U.K. is the most extreme example with an aggregate loss in party membership over 1.1 million between 1980 and 2009, a drop of 68% but most other European countries have seen falls of 30-50%. There does not seem to be any left/right bias in this fall; just a uniform decline in participation.

This fall in membership has been accompanied and may be partly caused by the gradual hollowing out of the meaning of ‘membership’ which has occurred in most European parties. Outside of small-town direct democracy, political parties are the key agency of modern participatory democracy, acting as they do to formulate policies and to promote leaders. They provide the collective participation necessary to provide elected governments with some kind of bedrock in the popular will.

Essentially, this hollowing-out process involves a transformation of ‘members’ into ‘active supporters’, that is people who are willing to assist with campaigning at elections by delivering leaflets and so on but who have little or no influence in the formation of party policy or the development of its leadership. This loss is mirrored by exactly the same phenomenon which was noted by Mbeki, the growth of a self-serving ‘professional political class’  composed of people who have made politics their career from an early age and have been promoted up the party ladder, often by becoming advisers to established politicians or, initially, by using family contacts. This ‘political class’ has become enmeshed with business interests, particularly in the financial sector, and with state agencies to form a circulating but sealed elite group who have largely gone to the same schools and universities. So for many voters all main parties ‘are the same’ thus making a mockery of multi-party democracy.

The other side of the collapse of the membership-based party has been the growth of ‘wild’ parties, that is parties with no historical base but which suddenly achieve electoral success based on popular discontent with the established parties. Syriza in Greece which polled only 4% of the national vote in 2009, became the main opposition only in 2012, received 27% of the vote in the European elections and has now won a stunning electoral victory in national elections with the rightwing governing party down to 23%, is the prime example of this phenomenon together with the U.K. Independence Party which topped the vote in the European elections also with 27%. 

In Italy, the Five Star Party founded by the comedian, Beppo Grillo, astonished the establishment by obtaining over 25% of the popular vote in 2013 national elections and over 21% in the 2014 European elections even though the party has been racked by rows over the alleged autocratic control of its founder. Both Syriza and the Five Star Party can be seen as left-radical but the more dominant trend in the growth of ‘wild’ parties has been that of the far-right anti-immigration groups such as UKIP. In the 2014 European election, far-right parties topped the poll in Denmark (the People’s Party with 26.6%) and France (National Front, 25.0%) whilst for the first time, more or less openly neo-Nazi parties – the National Democratic Party of Germany (NPD) and the Greek Golden Dawn (XA) – for the first time entered the European Parliament. This movement to the right is far from uniform over Europe though as a perceptive analysis is the Washington Post noted, “the abysmal performance of radical right parties in Eastern Europe is that mainstream right-wing parties in the region leave little space for the far right, given their authoritarian, nativist and populist discourse.”[vii] The common feature of all the right-wing parties is their vituperative hatred of immigrants, the most disturbing of all the political portents in Europe.

The second trend which mirrors the first has been the growth in importance of supranational bodies, notably the European Commission but including such as the IMF, which have little or no democratic basis but which exert power within countries comparable to or exceeding national government. Added to these are the other array of supranational bodies, the international corporations in particular financial ones which answer to no democratic authority at all. A prime example of the combination of these two power-bases is the pending Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership, an exceedingly complex treaty to be struck between the EU and the US government which amongst other things will enable transnational corporations to sue national governments inside the EU for any unilateral regulatory process which damages the interests of the corporation. National legislatures will have no say in agreeing in this package and although the European Parliament will vote on the whole deal, it will have no power to amend it.

A consequence of this bipartite congruence is that increasingly, national governments are seen as lacking many elements of real power. The failure to control the international financial markets even though their collapse in 2008 required bailouts by nation states is a prime example of this. The result is a further decline in interest in electing these supine governments.

The ‘democratic deficit’ of the EU has long been a topic of continual if ineffective debate. Essentially, the problem has always been that closer national ties have always had a political objectives but ones disguised as economic matters. Initially these could be seen as the benign hope that closer trade links would extinguish any possibility of the wars between European states which had effectively blighted the first half of the twentieth century. However, the changes in the name of this economic system, the Coal and Steel Community (1950), the European Economic Community (1957), the European Community (1993), and, finally, the European Union (2007) precisely mapped the gradual, if still largely implicit, shift towards political unity as well as the enlargement of the community which now includes 27 countries, quadrupling its original size, all without much in the way of democratic agreement by the electorate of the member countries.

The gradual evolution of the EU into a blatantly political body made a step jump in 1993 with the Maastricht Treaty which set up the euro as a common currency and established the so-called ‘three pillars of economics, foreign and military cooperation and home and judicial affairs, all largely undefined in the usual way of using generalised phrases which could later be turned into specific policy actions without any democratic basis. Maastricht was remodelled and refined by a series of further treaties (Amsterdam, 1997, Nice 2001, Lisbon 2007), all complex and all pushed through with almost no popular democratic approval. Nearly all attempts to put these treaties to popular vote have resulted in debacle. In 1992, the Danes rejected Maastricht and the French very nearly did so. In 2007, the only country to risk a referendum on the Lisbon Treaty, Ireland,  had it rejected and was forced to run another vote in which every screw was put on the electorate to vote Yes or, allegedly, risk oblivion. In fact real oblivion came in 2008 when the financial crisis resulted in the European Commission, backed by the European Central Bank and the IMF, stepping in to dictate economic policy in Greece, Ireland and most of southern Europe, insisting that elected governments be replaced by appointed technocratic leaders if they failed in their duty apply the financial austerity necessary to save the European banking system, something which actually happened in Greece and Italy.

It is a an odd irony that the problem of the democratic legitimacy of the EU is widely recognised even within the autocratic corridors of the European Commission just as they are being filled with the appointed new Commissioners who epitomise the problem. Even more ironic is that any move to alter the current position would almost certainly require a treaty change, something which is very unlikely to get past popular opinion in several EU members whose populations are itching to slap down Brussels if not to actually leave. It seems likely that the U.K., always the most eurosceptic member, will have some form of referendum on membership in the next three years which could easily result in the U.K.’s departure and precipitate further disorder. Meanwhile, the imposed austerity programmes in southern Europe which have led to economic stagnation continue to fester.

The root causes of the decline in democratic participation throughout Europe are hard to uncover. However it is striking that the moment in which decline really begins is also that in which neoliberal individualism bit back against the collectivism which had characterised Europe throughout the last century up the 1980s. As a recent book by Peter Weir puts it puts it when discussing the decline of the mass party:

A tendency to dissipation and fragmentation also marks the broader organisational environment within which the classic mass parties used to nest. As workers’ parties, or as religious parties, the mass organisations in Europe rarely stood on their own but constituted just the core element within a wider and more complex organizational network of trade unions, churches and so on. Beyond the socialist and religious parties, additional networks ... combined with political organisations to create a generalized pattern of social and political segmentation that helped root the parties in the society and to stabilize and distinguish their electorates. Over the past thirty years, however, these broader networks have been breaking up ... With the increasing individualization of society, traditional collective identities and organizational affiliations count for less, including those that once formed part of party-centred networks.[viii]

It is a depressing but undeniably plausible conjecture to link decline in the most fundamental aspect of progressive advance in the twentieth century, mass electoral democracy, with the resurgence of the most regressive, neo-liberal markets. It does suggest that reversing the decline in electoral democracy will need more than some simple turnaround in party policy. Speculation as to just where this dual crisis of democratic legitimacy is going would double the size of this essay and lead precisely no-where.  There are some dark forces gathering and it is almost inevitable that several countries are going to face serious political challenges from anti-immigration groups. There are some vibrant progressive forces which emerged, notably Syriza in Greece, but they are internationally isolated and have so-far failed to find a coherent strategic policy.

In the National Archaeological Museum in Athens, there is currently a temporary exhibition celebrating the shared cultural history of Greece and Italy. One exhibit is a small relief of a “Mourning Athena”. The accompanying description of this concludes by suggesting that “the contemplative expression of Athena reflects the sceptical way in which we should view the current political situation in Europe” When doubts about Europe’s political future appear inscribed in archaeological  analysis we know that we are in trouble.

(First published in The Thinker, December, 2014)

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[i] The Economist, 1 March 2014

[ii] London Review of Books, 22 May 2014, London

[iii] Patrick French, India: a Portrait, Penguin, 2012, ISBN 0141041579

[iv] http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/apr/06/money-bought-elections-us-donation-rules

[v] Francis Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man. Free Press 1992 ISBN 0-02-910975-2

[vi] Most of the quantitative measures in this section have been taken without further attribution from Peter Weir, Ruling the Void, Verso, London, 2013 ISBN 1844673243

[vii] Cas Mudd http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/monkey-cage/wp/2014/05/30/the-far-right-in-the-2014-european-elections-of-earthquakes-cartels-and-designer-fascists/ 30, May 2014

[viii] P. Weir op cit

Is the Green Moment Over?

There was a moment, early in 2010, when it seemed as if the sclerotic structure of British politics with its regular metronomic shifts between Labour and Conservative was, finally, going to be broken. With an election inevitable by May and with the smell of the Parliamentary expenses scandal still rising there was much rhetoric about new dawns and a new politics. In April in this blog, I myself asked Is a Revolution on the Way? The answer was a resounding No as, again, I noted in June. In particular, the May 2010 election was a disaster for the left, in particular for the Green Party. This had placed great hopes on it, standing a record number of candidates, over 200 in England and Wales. In the outcome, it only saved its deposit in three constituencies and, overall, showed a drop in votes over 2005, often more than 40% with the voting in London being particularly dismal. In Hampstead, for example, the vote dropped by 62% to only 759.

However, this overall failure was balanced by the one great success, the election of Caroline Lucas as the first Green Party M.P. in the House of Commons. In one way, this success outbalanced all the failures as it provided British politics with a recognisable star, a politician untainted by scandal with intelligence, flair and wit and with an outstanding ability to communicate. This was quickly recognised by Compass, the Labour Party pressure group, whose chair, Neal Lawson, suggested that she was the best leader Labour didn’t have and adopted her as Compass’ non-Labour icon. Perhaps the high point of this recognition was her speech at a rally following a large student protest march which showed that she was one of the few, perhaps only, politicians in Britain, who can move a mass audience with a clear and principled political speech. At the end of 2010, it seemed that the possibility existed for a mass mobilisation around Coalition cuts which could form outside the stifling hand of the Labour Party and which could form the basis for some kind of new left formation. In the chattering class in London there was much talk of ‘pluralism’, something emphasised at the Compass fringe meeting at the Labour conference in Manchester that year at which Lucas made a fleeting trip north of Watford, though when pressed no one seemed inclined to define the idea too precisely.

Unfortunately these hopes have now dissipated. The various anti-cuts groups have drifted off into the usual sectarian squabbling, the union backlash promised by Len McCluskey ― the Arthur Scargill of our days ― has failed to materialise and there is no sign whatever of any left formation, coalition, grouping, what-you-will, to challenge the dispirited political hegemony of the Labour Party over English left politics. In particular, Lucas has drifted off into a kind of serial Guardian letter-signing and the Green Party has failed to use her electoral success to improve its marginal position in public perception. It achieved a bounce in membership following the general election (but then so did all political parties even including the BNP) but this did not translate into political action. Indeed, writing as a Green Party member, the sudden prominence of having its first M.P. seemed to throw the party into a kind of genteel panic as to just how it should conduct itself on a national stage. Of course this is understandable given the limited size of the party. Even so, there are some structural problems which have served to constrain it.

The first of these is that the Green Party of England and Wales, to give its full title, is not really a national political party at all in the conventional sense. Indeed, historically, it has always been structured in organisational opposition to how other parties function. Essentially, the Green Party is a set of local groups working largely in isolation from each other, each with its own constitution, internal procedures and local membership. There is a small London-based secretariat, regional associations and a national executive but these have little or no contact with the largely autonomous local groups. The branch-secretary of my own party in Manchester, which covers five constituencies and is one of the larger local parties, tells me that he has never had any communication from the national headquarters other than the quarterly review sent to all members. This structure is deliberate and in full agreement with the GP Constitution which asserts that “The general practice of the Party shall be to encourage the greatest possible autonomy of each Local Party in its pursuit of the Object of the Party.” This local autonomy is coupled with a national constitution which for byzantine complexity (it runs to 25 pages) is more like the rulebook for a trade-union resulting from a dozen amalgamations than any constitutional basis for a national political party.

The result of this combination of absolute local autonomy and bureaucratic complexity at the national level is predictable; a central secretariat which operates on managerial lines (it is run, astonishingly, by a Chief Executive Officer rather like a City bank) and which absorbs most of the revenue but without any significant contact with or control over local parties, a national executive which has no clear role and which cannot fill its constitutionally defined membership, (this year the two posts of Campaigns and Policy Coordinators went unfilled by any nomination whilst most other jobs had but one nomination), and local groups which vary widely in the emphasis of their activities. In practice, the Green Party operates as a series of informal networks without any clear coordination and with rivalries and political conflicts muffled though still present. An example of the muddle which pervades the party is the ‘job-share’ which invariably crops up whenever two people aspire to the same role. Rather than have the horror of a contested election, the two are asked to work in tandem, an arrangement which, to be euphemistic, always results in much less than the sum of its parts. One of Caroline Lucas’ more alarming ideas was to allow M.Ps to be elected on a similar job-share basis.

It is both inevitable that this curious combination of extreme local autonomy and great constitutional complexity that the Green Party finds it very difficult to mount any kind of national campaign particularly anything that requires leading a coalition of political agents. It encourages members to participate in campaigns organised by others; Caroline Lucas and other luminaries lend their names to honorary positions in these and speak on their platforms often very effectively. But national leadership is sadly missing. Instead local elections are pursued with fervour as though the success of the LibDems since the 1980s in building up prominence in local government can be copied, losing sight of the fact that they started with an existing bunch of parliamentary seats and several nationally known leaders.

A further problem for the Greens is that on most policy areas, in particular those associated with environmental and economic issues they are out-gunned by much better resourced NGOs whose policy nostrums are difficult to contest. It is not so much that these policies are mistaken but that they are pursued in ways appropriate to a lobby group rather than a political party with little concern for priorities or compromises or, perhaps most important, with the aim of projecting a complete policy package. There have been times in the last few months when the Green Party has seemed to be much more concerned with badger culling than with the economic crisis in Europe. Of course, it can be argued that with its limited resources it is possible to have some impact on the former whilst being essentially irrelevant to the latter. But this misses the point. To be seen as a credible national party, we have to be seen as a political force able, potentially, to provide answers to the global economic crisis as well as the future well-being (or otherwise) of badgers.

It is not that the Green Party lacks policy. It has pages and pages of it, all laboriously worked out through the complex mechanisms of its policy formation and which cover all possible policy areas. The problem is that it does not seem to cohere in any way into a complete political programme. To some degree this results from the decidedly wacky nature of some of the central policies, in particular the economic. However, the main problem is political; a kind of nervousness about pushing for a programme which could unite others in the green/red coalition which has been talked about for a couple of decades but which never quite materialises.

This is a real tragedy for left politics. Labour manifestly flails around trying but failing to find any replacement for the neo-liberal policies of Blair and Brown and being reduced to Balls’ bombast and Milliband’s soporific clichés. There is on offer a clear political alternative based upon sustainability and equality which breaks with the fetishism of economic growth. A recent exposition of this is Tim Jackson’s book, Prosperity without Growth, but there are numerous other sources. Presented boldly as a way out of the current asphyxiating political climate where all three main parties sound much the same and none are believed, there could be the basis for a major political breakthrough. Unfortunately, the Green Party has failed to take advantage of the post-election window and it may not come again.

From Cancun to Durban

First published in the South African magazine The Thinker in April.

2010 may go down as the year in which climate change really went global. In August, Russia suspended wheat exports as an unprecedented drought ravaged yields. In January, 2011, the Tunisian president fled following riots caused in part by soaring bread prices whilst similar unrest spread across Algeria and Egypt. Floods in Australia knocked out nearly half its coal export capacity and steam coal prices reached $130/tonne into Europe just as snow-bound British consumers faced big price rises in electricity. Drought in Argentina impacted on soya prices which fed increase in meat prices.

Can climate change been blamed for all this? No one can say with any certainty. The strength of La Niña which has caused the heavy rain is Queensland is not without precedent and, whilst the Russian drought was abnormal, such lengthy episodes have occurred elsewhere. The UK had its coldest December on record but its electricity prices are mainly driven by European gas prices though these are, in turn, impacted by the cost of coal. And there were many other factors at work in Tunisia and elsewhere such as the lack of democracy. Protesters in Cairo were reported as chanting “Bread. Freedom. Social Justice” which summarises it. But as I noted in The Thinker a year ago, the number of extreme meteorological events have been steadily increasing . What 2010 showed was that such extreme weather events bring not just TV pictures of far-off calamity but will increasingly also effect people’s lives remote from that actual flood or drought or snowfall.

Such was the background to the Cancún conference. More formally, the “United Nations Climate Change Conference [which] took place in Cancún, Mexico, from 29 November to 10 December 2010. It encompassed the sixteenth Conference of the Parties (COP) and the sixth Conference of the Parties serving as the Meeting of the Parties to the Kyoto Protocol (CMP), as well as the thirty-third sessions of both the Subsidiary Body for Implementation (SBI) and the Subsidiary Body for Scientific and Technological Advice (SBSTA), and the fifteenth session of the AWG-KP and thirteenth session of the AWG-LCA.”

It would be wrong to suggest that Cancún was a failure in that there were any hopes dashed at its conclusion. It was universally expected that it would achieve nothing and so it turned out. Essentially all that was achieved was to insert some of aspirations reached on a multilateral basis at the Copenhagen conference (COP 15) the previous year into the agreed UN statement though without any kind of formally binding pledges. Perhaps the most dispiriting moment of the conference was the sight on the final morning of the Bolivian representative protesting on his own that the agreement was counter to the multilateral rules of the UN whilst it was being gavelled through by the Mexican foreign minister, Patricia Espinosa. The previous year’s alliance of small nations had effectively disintegrated with delegates cheering Espinosa so that at last they could flee to the airport.

There are, however, two actions at which the COP16 proved adept: the creation of new agencies and the deferral of decisions. The formal opening statement quoted above shows that the ‘Conference of the Parties’ already encompasses six other bodies, each with their own formal structures, secretariats, reports and responsibilities, which have been created in the previous fifteen conferences. Additionally the Conference of the Parties serving as the Meeting of the Parties to the Kyoto Protocol, which had its sixth session in Cancún, is the body which considers the progress of the Kyoto Protocol and which contains within its own structure a web of committees and advisory panels. COP16 added two new agencies to this network. First, the Conference:

102. Decides to establish a Green Climate Fund, to be designated as an operating entity of the financial mechanism of the Convention under Article 11, with arrangements to be concluded between the Conference of the Parties and the Green Climate Fund to ensure that it is accountable to and functions under the guidance of the Conference of the Parties, to support projects, programmes, policies and other activities in developing country Parties using thematic funding windows;
103. Also decides that the Fund shall be governed by a board of 24 members comprising an equal number of members from developing and developed country Parties; representation from developing country Parties shall include representatives from relevant United Nations regional groupings and representatives from small island developing States and the least developed countries; each board member shall have an alternate member; alternate members are entitled to participate in the meetings of the board only through the principal member, without the right to vote, unless they are serving as the member; during the absence of the member from all or part of the meeting of the board, his or her alternate shall serve as the member;
It was further agreed that this Fund would be run, initially, by the World Bank and designed by a Transitional Committee of 40 members supported by a secretariat drawn from relevant “United Nations agencies, international financial institutions, and multilateral development banks, along with the secretariat and the Global Environment Facility”

Any fund needs money even more, perhaps, than it needs staff to run it and the Conference:

97. Decides that, in accordance with the relevant provisions of the Convention, scaled up, new and additional, predictable and adequate funding shall be provided to developing country Parties, taking into account the urgent and immediate needs of developing countries that are particularly vulnerable to the adverse effects of climate change;
98. Recognizes that developed country Parties commit, in the context of meaningful mitigation actions and transparency on implementation, to a goal of mobilizing jointly USD 100 billion per year by 2020 to address the needs of developing countries;
99. Agrees that, in accordance with paragraph 1(e) of the Bali Action Plan, funds provided to developing country Parties may come from a wide variety of sources, public and private, bilateral and multilateral, including alternative sources;
100. Decides that a significant share of new multilateral funding for adaptation should flow through the Green Climate Fund;

Essentially, money tomorrow but more meetings today. Just how this new fund will differ either from the Global Environment Facility (GEF) set up as an independent agency in 1994 or the Special Climate Change Fund set up in 2001 to complement the GEF or indeed the Adaptation Fund set up under the Kyoto agreement is unclear given that the GEF already claims to act as the “financial mechanism” for the Climate Change Conference.

The second new agency will be a Technology Executive Committee supported by a Climate Technology Centre and Network. The composition of these is carefully set out in an Annex to the main report:

Annex IV
Composition and mandate of the Technology Executive Committee
1. The Technology Executive Committee shall comprise 20 expert members, elected by the Conference of the Parties, serving in their personal capacity and nominated by Parties with the aim of achieving fair and balanced representation, as follows:
(a) Nine members from Parties included in Annex I to the Convention;
(b) Three members from each of the three regions of the Parties not included in Annex
one to the Convention (non-annex I Parties) namely Africa, Asia and the Pacific, and Latin America and the Caribbean, one member from a small island developing State and one member from a least developed country Party;
2. The decisions will be taken according to the rule of consensus;
3. Parties are encouraged to nominate senior experts with a view to achieving, within the membership of the Technology Executive Committee, an appropriate balance of technical, legal, policy, social development and financial expertise relevant to the development and transfer of technology for adaptation and mitigation, taking into account the need to achieve gender balance in accordance with decision 36/CP.7;

With a further eight paragraphs detailing terms of office, procedure and protocols of working. Again, much detail as to how the meeting will be organised but precious little as to what they will actually do.
Set aside, for a moment, the implications of this organisational expansion for there is a much larger matter which will be sailing into Durban harbour this November when COP17 convenes in its next venue; the deferral of key decisions as to just how climate change is to be tackled. Three of these are contained in the main report:
…Agrees, in the context of the long-term goal and the ultimate objective of the Convention and the Bali Action Plan, to work towards identifying a global goal for substantially reducing global emissions by 2050, and to consider it at its seventeenth session…
6. Also agrees that Parties should cooperate in achieving the peaking of global and national greenhouse gas emissions as soon as possible, recognizing that the time frame for peaking will be longer in developing countries, and bearing in mind that social and economic development and poverty eradication are the first and overriding priorities of developing countries and that a low-carbon development strategy is indispensable to sustainable development. In this context, further agrees to work towards identifying a timeframe for global peaking of greenhouse gas emissions based on the best available scientific knowledge and equitable access to sustainable development, and to consider it at its seventeenth session;…
14. Invites all Parties to enhance action on adaptation under the Cancún Adaptation Framework, taking into account their common but differentiated responsibilities and respective capabilities, and specific national and regional development priorities, objectives and circumstances, by undertaking, inter alia, the following:
(a) Planning, prioritizing and implementing adaptation actions, including projects and
programmes, and actions identified in national and subnational adaptation plans and strategies, national adaptation programmes of action of the least developed countries, national communications, technology needs assessments and other relevant national planning documents;
(b) Impact, vulnerability and adaptation assessments, including assessments of financial needs as well as economic, social and environmental evaluation of adaptation options;
(c) Strengthening institutional capacities and enabling environments for adaptation, including for climate-resilient development and vulnerability reduction;
(d) Building resilience of socio-economic and ecological systems, including through economic diversification and sustainable management of natural resources;
(e) Enhancing climate change related disaster risk reduction strategies, taking into consideration the Hyogo Framework for Action where appropriate; early warning systems; risk assessment and management; and sharing and transfer mechanisms such as insurance, at local, national, subregional and regional levels, as appropriate;
(f) Measures to enhance understanding, coordination and cooperation with regard to climate change induced displacement, migration and planned relocation, where appropriate, at national, regional and international levels;
(g) Research, development, demonstration, diffusion, deployment and transfer of technologies, practices and processes; and capacity-building for adaptation, with a view to promoting access to technologies, in particular in developing country Parties;
(h) Strengthening data, information and knowledge systems, education and public awareness;
(i) Improving climate-related research and systematic observation for climate data collection, archiving, analysis and modelling in order to provide decision makers at national and regional levels with improved climate-related data and information;
15. Decides to hereby establish a process to enable least developed country Parties to formulate and implement national adaptation plans, building upon their experience in preparing and implementing national adaptation programmes of action, as a means of identifying medium and long-term adaptation needs and developing and implementing strategies and programmes to address those needs;
16. Invites other developing country Parties to employ the modalities formulated to support the above-mentioned national adaptation plans, in the elaboration of their planning effort referred to in paragraph 14 (a) above;
17. Requests the Subsidiary Body for Implementation to elaborate modalities and guidelines for the provisions of paragraphs 15 and 16 above, for adoption by the Conference of the Parties at its seventeenth session;
…
80. Decides to consider the establishment, at its seventeenth session, of one or more market-based mechanisms to enhance the cost-effectiveness of, and to promote, mitigation actions, taking into account the following:
(a) Ensuring voluntary participation of Parties, supported by the promotion of fair and equitable access for all Parties;
(b) Complementing other means of support for nationally appropriate mitigation actions by developing country Parties;
(c) Stimulating mitigation across broad segments of the economy;
(d) Safeguarding environmental integrity;
(e) Ensuring a net decrease and/or avoidance of global greenhouse gas emissions;
(f) Assisting developed country Parties to meet part of their mitigation targets, while ensuring that the use of such mechanism or mechanisms is supplemental to domestic mitigation efforts;
(g) Ensuring good governance and robust market functioning and regulation;
…
84. Decides to consider the establishment, at its seventeenth session, of one or more non-market-based mechanisms to enhance the cost-effectiveness of, and to promote, mitigation actions;
85. Requests the Ad Hoc Working Group on Long-term Cooperative Action under the Convention to elaborate the mechanism or mechanisms referred to in paragraph 84 above, with a view to recommending a draft decision or decisions to the Conference of the Parties for consideration at its seventeenth session;

There is an understandable tendency for eyelids to droop when confronted by a page of this kind of officialise but it is really necessary to read it attentively in order to appreciate the awesome task which will confront delegates to COP 17 in twelve days between 28 November and 9 December.

First, one should note the compression of the choices to be made. After sixteen annual sessions, the conference will finally try to decide upon a “ timeframe for global peaking of greenhouse gas emissions” taking into account the different pace of change which social justice demands between developed and less-developed countries. At the same time, it will try to decide upon an appropriate “process to enable least developed country Parties to formulate and implement national adaptation plans” as well as reviewing at least two mechanisms “to enhance the cost-effectiveness of, and to promote, mitigation actions”, one or more of which will be market-based and one or more of which will be non-market based. Now it should be apparent to the least technically-inclined that these choices are not independent. Clearly, any adaptation strategy depends crucially upon the timeframe within which that adaptation has to be made. Peaking of emissions within ten years carries quite different implications for climate change impact than peaking within fifty years. Similarly different mitigation mechanisms are likely to be effective within quite different time-scales so their adoption must also depend upon decisions about time-scale. It is also probable that both adaptation and mitigation mechanisms are likely to interact with each other so cannot be considered in isolation.

Second, round every corner in this complex maze, the issue of money , specifically how much money is going to flow from rich to poor countries and just when, confronts one. A commitment to providing $100 billion annually from unspecified sources by 2020 gives precious little insight into just how much and under what mechanism money is going to flow before then, in particular how much is going to be provided to poorer countries to develop the “national adaptation plans” for meeting climate change. Here one might note another decision deferred to Durban: a request for

…the Subsidiary Body for Implementation to continue its consideration of the second comprehensive review of the implementation of the framework for capacity building in developing countries at its thirty-fourth session on the basis of the draft text contained in the annex to this decision, with a view to preparing a draft decision on the outcome of this review for adoption by the Conference of Parties at its seventeenth session.

This draft Annex contains the ominous clause “that gaps still remain and the availability of and access to financial and technical resources is still an issue to be addressed, in order to progress qualitatively and quantitatively on the capacity-building implementation”. In other words, poor countries still lack the money even to undertake the required adaptation plans let alone implement them. The Green Climate Fund with its 40-person Transitional Committee will, in the end, be responsible for allocating much of the promised funds but fails to answer any of the pressing immediate problems of financing both adaptation and mitigation. Both are to be answered by decisions in Durban.

There are two dream scenarios for Durban. The first is that the first Afro-American President of the USA will go to Durban and promise to make as a key feature of his re-election campaign US commitment to immediate and binding action to save Africa from the worst effects of climate change and to immediately commit substantial, quantified funds to adaptation. A dream but not one to bet the farm on. Over half US citizens are now reported to doubt climate-change and it would take a miracle for Obama to secure re-election with such a policy having failed to get what was then a nominally Democratic Congress to pass even a modest climate change bill.

The second dream is more realistic: that China should present a new policy initiative committing itself to substantial domestic emission cuts and to guarantee significant funds to transferring new technology to poorer countries. In other words to grab the leadership role abdicated by the USA. There are indications that the Chinese government has focussed on environmental technologies, in particular clean energy, as the main vehicle for shifting its manufacturing sector up to a new level based upon technology rather than cheap labour. Chinese-built electric cars are already entering the US market and it has taken a lead in the manufacture of photovoltaic panels. Judicious purchase of overseas firms with the right technical base is already underway using a handy war-chest of more than $1 trillion of US Treasury bonds. The key technology is undoubtedly carbon-capture-and-storage (CCS), an essential to reducing carbon emissions in any country based upon coal as its primary fuel. CCS is a tricky bit of heavy-duty chemical engineering but it is not quantum electrodynamics and will succumb to a healthy dose of investment. There have been rather half-hearted pilot programmes in Europe and the USA but the barrier to success has always been that it has been very difficult to impose investment in the required centralised transport and storage systems on the free-market structure which has evolved in both continents. Progress has also been hindered by the fact that powerful environmental lobbies have largely opposed CCS development preferring to support enhanced conservation and renewables, technologies appropriate to mature energy sectors but not to ones with rapidly growing electricity demand based on coal. Neither of these will trouble China and if it could crack CCS and then offer it to the world, it would not only gain leadership in climate change but also reap substantial financial rewards.

In a wider context, the future role of China and also in India (now the third biggest carbon emitter in the world having overtaken Russia in 2009) in progressing action on climate change can be seen as just part of the historic shift eastwards in economic leadership. How these two countries respond to the environmental challenge could become a defining moment in this shift.

But if this second dream is better based in reality, it remains just a possibility without any base in government action and in its absence there has come to be increasing focus on just whether the annual UN Climate Change Conferences can possibly deliver any significant agreement on new policies. It has been reported that even the UN Secretary-General, Ban Ki-moon, has given up on the process and there seems little optimism that COP 17 will be able to tackle the long list of deferred decisions.

It is eighteen years since the so-called Earth Summit in Rio kicked off what has now become an annual jamboree for the environment business. Rio was claimed to open up a new kind of international conference which banished back-room deals in smoke-filled rooms in which ‘openness and transparency’ were its watchwords and environmental lobbies of all kinds were promised full participation. In Cancún, as well as 190 country delegations of varying sizes, no less than 1,297 environmental groups took advantage of this and were given full observer status ranging from Aarhus University and A SEED Europe from the Netherlands to ZeroFootPrint from Toronto and the London-based Zoological Society. In addition, 83 so-called inter-governmental organisations ranging from the African Centre of Meteorological Application for Development from Niamey to The European Organisation for the Exploitation of Meteorological Satellites were accredited. The exhibition centre adjacent to the conference had over 250 stalls whilst journalist accreditation was capped at 2000. No one really knows how many people attended in one capacity or another. Perhaps 20,000. As well as the six official meetings running simultaneously, some 250 side-events were organised, each given a 90-minute slot . Most of this can still be seen on Climate Change TV ( http://www.climate-change.tv/ ) which was run from an onsite studio.

All done in the name of openness and transparency but, in practice, deals are still done in backrooms, possibly less smoke-filled, and the conferences are dominated by rumours as just who is being pressured to do what and by whom. When a delegate from a poor African country stands up to effectively denounce the policy agreed by the group of African countries, it is widely (and probably justifiably) assumed that they have done this because the Americans have threatened to remove their US aid allocation. In both Cancún and Copenhagen, the final document agreed by the conference was essentially cobbled together by delegates from a small group of countries and pushed through despite objections from those outside the inner circle.

The Kyoto Protocol agreed in 1997 remains the high-point of this mode of international negotiation. It took a further eight years for enough countries to ratify Kyoto for it to actually come into force and it is hard to avoid the conclusion that, since then, the annual get-togethers have not served any real purpose apart from absorbing huge amounts of time and money. The reality is that the basis of any new agreement essentially depends upon China and the USA as the major players with the EU, Russia and India acting as important secondary agents. The process set up at the Earth Summit in Rio was intended to ensure that, by allowing full inclusion, the importance of the issue could not be dodged and the major actors would be forced to accept their responsibilities. The problem is that the solution has become the problem as now these major agents are able to use the cacophony of the event with its mass of simultaneous meetings of a dozen different bodies and thousands participants, each trying to make their voices heard and insisting on their equivalent importance, to erect a smokescreen about their actual intentions. They are able to hide inside the pandemonium.

What is required is a forum within which the major national agents are fully exposed to the pressure of world expectation but are also isolated and required to reach agreement about action within their own small group. Just how this can be achieved remains unclear. Not one of the 1,297 observer NGOs or 83 IGOs let alone any of the 190 member country delegations is going to voluntarily cede their status provided they can finance the trip. Durban is set to be just as much of a mass circus as Cancún or Copenhagen. The South African government could kidnap the appropriate delegations as they landed at Durban and seclude them under armed guard in a remote town with only sandwiches and one beer a day each until they signed an agreement. This, however, seems unlikely. But the South African government as the President of COP 17 is going to take on a heavy responsibility for steering it to even a moderately successful outcome, success being defined in terms of some decisions actually being taken rather than once again deferred. A third successive failure would cast serious doubt over the point of the annual Climate Change Conference.

It is not possible to make any forecasts as to where the world will stand on 10 December, 2011. Just one certain prediction; look elsewhere than Durban for any pre-Christmas break in early December if what you want is quiet beaches and cheap hotels.