On 11 December 2018 I took part in the Ministerial Talanoa, face to face story telling with ministers, as part of the political phase of the Talanoa Dialogue at COP24 in Katowice as one of two members of the Research and Independent NGOs constituency. Below is the story I shared. Here you can also listen to it at 3 hours 34 min:https://attend-emea.broadcast.skype.com/sv-SE/2a6c12ad-406a-4f33-b686-f78ff5822208/bf3826cd-ac7a-4636-bd0a-b9542b605fb5/player?cid=e6bcwiw5cvflolbhrvmwds7yfx4akz5p3rn3ue7og7zutcuwhrla&rid=EMEA
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My story is your story. The story of almost
200 countries on a beautiful blue planet engaged in a joint endeavour of grand
proportions -addressing climate change. In doing so you have, as is your habit,
developed an international treaty containing a mixture of legal and moral
obligations as a basis for your efforts.
You devised an accountability mechanism for
the treaty suited to a community of peers that want to help and encourage each
other to action, rather than to scold and sanction each other for inaction. This
mechanism includes a global reflection every five years on the sufficiency of
aggregate action that shall inform the plans for how much a country will do
next.
Accountability can be defined as being about
telling a story, based on some obligation and with some consequences. You are
now here in the trial run of the global stocktake telling your stories based on
your obligations. The decisive question is: how do you make obligatory story
telling at global level have sufficient consequences in the form of enhanced
ambition at national level?
This year I lead a research project with GLOBE and One World Trust beginning
to search the answer to this question. We looked for good examples of how
countries are engaging with the Talanoa Dialogue at home and how they are planning
to engage with future global stocktakes.
We found 37 Talanoa Dialogues organised by
governments at national or regional level. Most of them were stand alone one
day multi-stakeholder events with story telling of best practices and not
linked to a policy process. One shining exception was Peru that held a
three-month long public deliberation process with stakeholders throughout the
country feeding into developing regulations for their climate legislation.
We found that some of you like the Republic of
the Marshall Islands, Mexico and the EU have adapted their legislative or
policy frameworks to include five-year review cycles of climate plans aligned
with the global stocktake. Many others have not yet done so.
Based on our preliminary results we recommend
you to bring the outcome
of this Talanoa Dialogue home to your countries, empower your parliament to
take a lead role in organising a reflection process on its implications. This
ensures broad legitimacy and consideration of cross-sectoral policy
implications. Then, if you have not done so already, enhance ambition. But as
important is to evaluate the experience of the reflection process itself and
use that when you adjust legislation and design future processes. Key questions
for such an evaluation are: how was the process able to foster earnest and
uplifting reflection, combining careful analysis of experience with unlocking
enthusiasm for doing more across all sectors?
If I ended the story here countries would be on their own in
learning how to best design their national ambition mechanism. Why not build a
learning community among yourselves, share in your Nationally Determined Contributions or National
Communications your failures and successes in reflecting for enhanced ambition and
discuss these when you meet?
How this story will end is a lot up you. You have designed an
accountability mechanism asking everyone of you - the governments of the world
- to look yourself in the mirror every five years together with your
parliamentarians, scientists and citizens and earnestly
compare your climate actions to the moral and legal standards of the Paris
Agreement and if there are mismatches - step up action.
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