To what degree should international negotiation be India’s major theoretical activity when dealing with climate change? To what extent do India’s negotiators at the UNFCCC annual series of meetings represent its people at home, and if so through which channels? How are governance and determination of choices at the local level in India – choices that can lead to more communities becoming more responsible about their climate change impacts – translated by our negotiators at annual international meetings? These are some of the questions we find need to be asked more sharply, and more persistently, and for which we wish to hear answers.

Commentaries like ‘A map and a compass for climate talks’, by Navroz K Dubash and Lavanya Rajamani of the Centre for Policy Research (published in The Hindu, 23 July 2014), give us an interesting glimpse of the world that our international climate talks negotiators inhabit, but it has not posed such questions nor helped provide answers. This is the dialectic that needs to change, and quickly. It is 17 years since the Kyoto Protocol was adopted and every year thereafter, the number of meetings for negotiations has increased and the numbers of those who are now experts at negotiations has swelled at an ever faster rate. This new and hyper-mobile population of negotiators cannot claim any success, however minor, that has come from this annual festival of discussion (carried out by spending taxpayers’ money). What then is their use, to us in India especially?

In their article, Dubash and Rajamani have provided a rapid account of the adoption of negotiating positions by India and the differences between them at different periods. They have illustrated this by referring to articles written recently by former Environment and Forests Minister Jairam Ramesh and by Chandrashekhar Dasgupta, described as “a mainstay of India’s negotiating team for two decades”. Given the failure rate of the annual round of climate change negotiations, the strategical quibbling by both Ramesh and Dasgupta are of very little use locally in India. That is why we think the Centre for Policy Research and similar institutes and establishments which study climate change in all its perplexing colours (none of them more frustrating than the UN negotiations) must alter the subject – to the ‘whom’ of people where they live rather than the ‘what’ of negotiating positions.

The two authors, looking ahead to “the next landmark climate negotiating session” – we ask that empty hyperbole like ‘landmark’ be dropped from a process that is nothing but 20 years of getting nowhere expensively – have said it is time to “look forward and anticipate how a principled approach, strategic vision, political acumen and technical expertise can be better combined in India’s negotiating approach”. Surely, Ramesh and Dasgupta (perhaps in reverse order) ought to be bluntly asked why India has not had a principled approach, strategic vision, political acumen and technical expertise which – and we emphasise this – helps deal with climate change locally, in the districts and towns, and which then becomes the position that India takes in the crowded climate talks ballrooms of the world?

The commentary is worried about preparations to be made before the next big meeting in 2015. The usual formula is there – “national contributions”, “emissions mitigation component”, “adaptation, finance, technology and capacity building” and (best of all for the financiers who haunt every COP) “proposed investments”. The authors then refer to the Economic Survey 2013-14, which has a chapter (it is chapter 12, out of place amongst the others as if it wandered in from some storybook) on climate change. This they say mentions the need to develop contributions but that this mention has come very late – cue Messers Dasgupta and Ramesh for sepia-toned explanations.

And finally, the authors complain that “there is little evidence of a serious national dialogue on such contributions, which is critical to ensuring ownership of, responsibility for and delivery of these contributions across levels of governance and segments of society”. They could have spoken more plainly. There is no dialogue, because the central and state governments have not invested in dialogue (ask Ramesh how he got his government to invest in an excellent national discussion about Bt brinjal), and because our negotiators at COP, CMP, SBI and SBSTA never bothered to ask for it either. Who did it suit to cloak climate negotiations as being about technology, finance and law to an exclusively expert degree, thereby shutting the citizen out?

What we wish to hear very much of – and the Ministry has not obliged – is where the priorities of the BJP-led NDA government mesh (or clash) with the theory of a multi-lateral approach to climate change negotiations (now 20 years old). The climate circuit and its habitues in (and from) India have become used to the vocabulary of the circuit, so used to it that they have neglected to learn some of the other vocabularies found in documents such as the Union Budget speech and the Economic Survey, which have very much less to do with multi-lateral feinting at UNFCCC meetings and very much more to do with gritty economics at home. It isn’t too late for India to sound more like Gorakhpur than like Geneva at such talks, and only when that happens will we see tehsil and municipality begin to respond – the ‘equity’ that India is said to be a champion of at the negotiations can only have substance if it begins at home.

– Rahul Goswami