ABSTRACT
This chapter proposes an account of climate negotiations based on ethnographic observation at 21st Conference of the Parties to the Climate Convention (COP21) and at an intermediate negotiation session in Bonn in June 2015, interviews with participants and extensive analysis of negotiation documents, reports and grey literature that circulated at COP21. The spatial choreography and temporal dramaturgy of climate conferences and of international conferences more generally are organised around the production of text. While intersessions receive less media attention, creating the possibility to engage in or maintain less formal interactions and explore areas for possible compromise, COPs create a unity in time and space and impose a specific temporality and rhythm on negotiations. The progressive materialisation of the document, always tacit, never explicit, was followed by media and civil society through a peculiar way of assessing progress based on two simple metrics: the size of each new draft text and the number of remaining brackets.
