Built to Fail: Rules at UN Climate Talks Favor the Status Quo, Not Progress

Frustration about slow progress at the United Nations climate talks boiled over this week. After hours under the equatorial sun at COP30 in Belém, Brazil, scores of protesters pushed past security guards Tuesday evening and briefly occupied parts of the negotiating area, calling for an end to mining and logging in the Amazon, among other demands.

The clash symbolized a deeper tension at the heart of the U.N. climate summits. The people demanding change are often outside the gates while those with power inside are bound by rules that slow progress to a crawl.

UNFCCC officials said two people suffered minor injuries and that parts of the venue were temporarily closed for cleanup and security checks. The U.N. and local police are investigating the protests and the talks resumed on schedule Wednesday morning. 

On Instagram, a group calling itself Juventude Kokama OJIK posted a video of the Blue Zone occupation and called it an act against exclusion.

“They created an ‘exclusive’ space within a territory that has ALWAYS been Indigenous, and this violates our dignity,” the group wrote. “The demonstration is to say that we will not accept being separated, limited, or prevented from circulating in our own land. The territory is ancestral, and the right to occupy this space is non-negotiable.”

The Tuesday tumult was a stark contrast to normal proceedings at the annual conference, where delegates with swinging lanyards and beeping phones usually file meekly through the metal detectors and past the espresso kiosks as if they’re heading to an office supply expo rather than negotiations to avert catastrophic climate collapse.

Somehow, that urgency rarely crept inside, partly because the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change runs the annual meetings like a corporate conference, said Danielle Falzon, a sociologist at Rutgers University whose research on the climate talks draws on dozens of interviews with negotiators and other participants from both developed and developing countries at most COPs since 2016. 

In the UNFCCC setting, she said, success is measured by how long you stay in the room, how polished your presentation is, how fluent you are in bureaucratic English—and how well you can pretend that the world isn’t burning outside.

“I’d like to go to the negotiations and see people taking seriously the urgency and the undeniability of the massive changes we’re seeing,” she said. “I’d like to see them break through the sterilized, shallow, diplomatic language and talk about climate change for what it actually is.”

For all its talk of unity, the climate summit has struggled to deliver because the talks mirror the global inequalities they are meant to fix, Falzon said. Based on her research, COP hasn’t made much progress because it still fails to serve the countries that have contributed least to the problem but are suffering the most from it.

The negotiations, she said, are dominated by well-staffed teams from wealthy, developed nations that can afford to be everywhere at once. Smaller delegations from less-developed countries often can’t even attend the dozens of overlapping meetings.

“Everyone is exhausted but people from smaller delegations are just trying to keep up,” she said. That exhaustion, she added, shapes the talks themselves: those with the most capacity set the pace and define the terms, while the rest simply try not to fall behind.

“You can’t just pretend that all countries are equal in the negotiating space,” she said.

The imbalance is built into the institution, she said. The U.N. climate process was designed to keep everyone at the table, not to shake it. That makes it resilient, but also resistant to change, and she said her multiyear study of the talks shows the system values consensus and procedure over outcomes and the appearance of progress over actual results. 

“Much of what’s called success at COP now is the creation of new texts, new work programs, rather than real climate action,” she said. After 30 years of meetings, the pattern delivers new agendas, new acronyms and new promises that keep the gears grinding but rarely move the needle on emissions, she added.

Most people involved in the climate talks see the need for change, but Falzon said that institutions are built to preserve themselves.

How (Not) to Talk About Climate

Part of the paralysis Falzon describes stems from a reluctance to speak plainly about the emergency it exists to address, said Max Boykoff, a climate communications researcher at the University of Colorado Boulder.

“The problems associated with climate change were first framed as scientific issues all the way back in the 1980s, and that has become the dominant way we understand a changing climate,” Boykoff said. “But that has crowded out other ways of knowing; emotional, experiential, aesthetic, or even just visceral ways of understanding that something’s not right.”

The experts at COP “tend to focus on what can be measured and reported, on outputs and deliverables, which shapes the negotiations themselves,” he said. “The cadence of those encounters becomes ritualized to their detriment.”

A quick look at some of the daily notifications from COP30 displays what Boykoff describes, with invitations to a “High-Level Ministerial on Multilevel Governance” or “The Launch of the Plan to Accelerate Multilevel Governance and the Operationalization of the Coalition for High Ambition Multilevel Partnerships.” 

Such language, he said, reflects a culture that prizes precision and hierarchy over connection and clarity. It’s a diplomatic shorthand that signals professionalism while numbing urgency, and it narrows the space for creativity, emotion, or reflection, he added.

Boykoff said the only way to move beyond the rituals of repetition may be to break them. 

“What we really need,” he said, “is to shake it up, to create spaces that let people reflect, feel, and engage in new ways. Because if we keep doing the same thing year after year, we shouldn’t expect different results.”

Falzon said the technocratic UNFCCC language reflects the dominance at the talks of an “old world hierarchy in which rich countries set the agenda, poor countries fight to be heard, and the system keeps reproducing the conditions it’s supposed to fix. 

“It’s not just the negotiations that are unequal,” she said. “The whole thing mirrors the inequalities of the world it’s meant to change.”