8am, Howard College, 28 November 2011. I arrive at Howard College once again, following the weekend of madness that was COY7. Set up on the hill, spatially and symbolically far from the COP17 proceedings at the ICC, it felt strange to be on the side of civil society whilst Juli and Nick (along with Jacob Zuma) were down in the official space below.
Expecting to find the C17 more organised than the weekend, we were surprised to find the campus a hub of disorganisation – the programme and events were unclear, and the “youth space” which we headed to eventually was spectacularly empty. I couldn’t help but feel a sigh of disappointment. I could just imagine the politicians in their protocol-controlled sessions tut-tutting and saying, “typical”.
But despite this, we eventually stumbled upon a joint Eskom-UJ working group for youth on “Paradoxes of climate change: the green economy and sustainable development”. The delegates in the working group were actually there as part of a programme which will spend the next 10 days of COP working on this problem: addressing a workable solution to the “green economy” question. After the craziness of the first few days of COY, which – while amazingly educational – were pretty ideological and complex, finding ourselves in a space which was not only talking about the actual issues at hand but actually doing something about it was a great breath of fresh air.
After taking part in this workshop, I started to understand a bit more about what the C17 space is about: providing workable solutions to the issues at hand. And as much as politicians feel indignant about the civil society’s disorganisation, so do many NGOs about what the “Conference of the Polluters” achieves, because they are actually already working out solutions to the issues at hand, but don’t have the political support needed to make larger changes.
And during this event, which is like a “global brainstorm” about a world-wide problem, one has to ask, why is there division between those thinking about what happens on the ground and those doing stuff on the ground?
To some extent, the fact that there is a separate “people’s space” to the “negotiator’s space” for COP17 points to a larger, more subtle problem. The separation of political rhetoric and what actually happens on the ground seems to be the status quo everywhere. Why is this? And could addressing this start to solve the political deadlocks and lack of progress over the last 16 COPs?
