Perfect Summitry: COP26 Tips for Public Company Management
By Richard Howitt, Skytop Contributor / November 9th, 2021
Richard’s background celebrates three decades as a strategic thinker who integrates innovation into organizational practice. A 22-year member of the European Parliament Rapporteur on Corporate Social Responsibility, he led the EU’s Non-Financial Reporting Directive. This initiative, recognized as the world’s foremost legislation on Corporate Transparency, brought him to new challenges.
This includes his work as CEO of the International Integrated Reporting Council, the Task Force on Climate-Related Financial Disclosure, Advisor to the UN Global Compact, Member of the European Commission SDG Platform, and the UN Guiding Principles for Business and Human Rights Reporting Framework Eminent Persons’ Group.
Richard is recognized as a Sage Top 100 Global Business Influencer, Thomson Reuters ‘Top 30’ Influencer in Risk, Compliance and Regtech. He is a Member of the B20 International Business Leaders’ Group and its Climate and Resource Efficiency Task Force. He currently serves as Strategic Advisor on Corporate Responsibility and Sustainability, and Senior Associate at the law firm Frank Bold LLC.
Summitry Defined
As the world’s media is dominated by the COP26 Summit in Glasgow, with an army of business leaders central to many of the discussions, what is it which makes a successful summit and how can business play a constructive role in achieving this?
As a veteran of many such summits including the Rio +20 UN Summit for Sustainable Development which led to the creation of the Sustainable Development Goals and the 2015 Climate Change Summit which produced the Paris Accord, it is perhaps instructive to learn the lessons on what makes effective summitry, as much as it is to become immersed in all the detail of what is being discussed?
The detail matters, but only if it is ultimately agreed — and implemented.
Indeed, the lesson of so many summits which we have all witnessed, is how little most of them matter in retrospect. A political platform to enable the host in particular to impress their domestic audience, certainly. But only until the next one comes along.
In history, we all know how Yalta divided up post-war Europe, Messina led to the foundation of today’s European Union and how the U.S. presentation at the UN changed world opinion in the face of the Cuban missile crisis.
But how many more such events are forgettable – and forgotten?
A Changing Role for Business
The first lesson for business in all this is in the radical shift in expectations about the business role itself.
In history, those summits were for governments and governments alone.
Even thirty years ago, conversations between business and governments around summits took place in private, with companies seeking to stay out of the spotlight. The private sector role was sometimes panned by critics as secretive and occasionally as downright corrupt. But business hid behind the ‘non-political’ mantra and tried to leave the controversies to the politicians.
Today the critics are still present. Indeed, mass protests and how they are managed have become just as much part of summitry as the deep pile carpets, elaborate stages and
late-night dinners.
Glasgow and Its Summitry
Let us see whether Glasgow is remembered for the politicians in the conference rooms or of the Extinction Rebellion from outside?
Protesters will indeed make their mark again in Glasgow, the public attention around a summit being a prime opportunity to articulate legitimate public concern and demands. Business leaders must be wary of fuelling their criticisms and should address, not reject, adversarial views in the new era of transparency and accountability.
However, the big change today is that it is no longer hidden that business makes a major impact on society as well as on the economy. Business has become an open and expected participant.
In Glasgow, there is already a long line of business leaders keen to make speeches, address side events and ensure a visual record of their participation.
Many of these will be authentic, some will be castigated as greenwash.
Building Coalitions
Meanwhile, don’t overlook the fact that civil society has its own dilemmas, sometimes incorporated into semi-official parallel events to give differing degrees of at least the appearance of inclusion, sometimes in marches behind barricades and barbed wire. Sometimes both.
Policy makers actually define business and civil society together as ‘non-state actors’ in such processes. It is in coalition-building rather than in private back rooms and corridors that the astute business of today will make its own mark.
I have served in the G20 government summits in both the B20 group of business advisers and –at different times –in the C20 group of civil society interests. What surprised me most was not contradictions, but a remarkable similarity in many of the same discussions and views being put forth.
So, the busy business leader should not simply be asking what is happening in the summit, but how the company is engaging and who with?
Government Mindset
The governmental perspective ought to share this aspiration and every summit will feature ‘advocate’ countries who see themselves (and want to be seen) as leaders on the subject.
Expectations management is key to such countries, setting the bar high enough but not too high to both motivate fellow delegates towards success without disappointing domestic and stakeholder audiences on the scale of the ambition.
Going beyond the ‘usual suspects’ to recruit new and unexpected champions on particular subjects amongst the participants is an eye-catching tactic to get others to shift their position.
But the key to a successful outcome is to recognise that for most countries, the mindset in international summitry is a defensive one, aimed at averting any outcomes perceived as detrimental to their national interests.
There are also the countries directly hostile to and seeking to sabotage any successful outcome.
I will never forget the line of diplomatic cars outside the UN building in Geneva at 6am in the morning before it even opened, lined up to ensure ‘friendly’ countries were first in line to speak during the debate on the universal periodic review of the human rights record of a particularly notorious country. The aim was to filibuster out any potential criticism.
The early years of the former Trump administration in the United States were marked by unprecedented actions to disavow G7 summit declarations on climate change and on multilateral trade rules.
For the middle group of countries, success lies in understanding where the red lines are and finding compromise wording with which everyone can live.
A key is exploiting the people in the room, but also understanding the limits on them imposed by their colleagues and superiors back at base. I used to meet both Geneva and national representatives of the same countries on the same issues and could see how exposure to alternative viewpoints gave the internationals a very different perspective.
This is multilateralism in practice – and why it’s worth fighting for.
For the hostile countries, the battle often becomes a procedural one, understanding how veto powers, timetabling motions and the coded meaning of particular words can be used and abused in the summit process.
The United Nations never legalises military action in name but uses the term ‘all necessary measures’ to do so. Everyone present understands its meaning.
The perverse truth is that there is frequently merit in being the recalcitrant party and sometimes disadvantage in being the first mover.
In Paris, the European Union had all the external credit for being a genuine leader on climate change, openly challenging others to go further and faster.
However, Europe was de facto excluded from the deal-making at the critical final stage essentially because it had spent its political capital, and the real challenge was in how to get China on board.
In Rio, I was part of the meeting with an alliance of countries which ‘suddenly’ unveiled what became paragraph 47 of the summit text, which had been carefully assembled beforehand in reality, and which represented a major step forward on business reporting of sustainability performance.
We even set up the ‘friends of paragraph 47’ group to oversee its implementation.
In a similar capacity, I was part of the lobbying with the ‘sherpa’ (now UN Secretary-General) Amina Mohammed, which led to the agreement of Target 12.6 of the Sustainable Development Goals – the key part of the SDGs which also makes explicit commitment to business sustainability reporting.
Negotiating Skills
It was equally in the incredible diplomatic skills (as well as deep technical knowledge) of the sadly recently departed John Ruggie, then UN Secretary-General Special Representative, which allowed the UN to move from deep division to full agreement in establishing the Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights. He did so amongst other ways by reviving the centuries-old concept of ‘due diligence’ and then applying it in a new context.
In Europe, small countries acting as ‘honest brokers’ are often the best mediators, where large countries are seen as having vested interests too large to operate impartially.
My own work to successfully secure a European law on non-financial (sustainability) reporting by business was aided in the final stages by skilful assistance from the then Greek Presidency of the EU.
What all these examples illustrate is that remarkable ‘negotiators’ can be crucial game-changers in achieving summit success.
The lessons are also that it is in apparently anodyne and technical terms in which the key arguments are won and that knowing who to speak to and getting their attention in an always crowded environment are the keys to success.
It is also essential to understand that most of the important elements of any agreement have been long discussed and prepared in advance, and that it can be fatal to wait too late to exercise any genuine influence.
The trick is in the ‘square brackets’ — the critical points for agreement which are not yet agreed – on which the genuine negotiating takes place.
Lessons for Business
What does this all mean for business?
There is no substitute to getting into the details if you want to genuinely participate in influencing the outcome.
If you leave it to trade associations or sectoral bodies, they will keep you informed of what has happened after it has happened.
But you should understand that these organisations have the same defensive mindset as that middle group of countries. Their principal objective can be to stop certain decisions from being agreed, whatever the rhetoric. Too often their agenda is set by the lowest common denominator amongst their membership, to the great frustration of the individual business leaders who want to demonstrate greater vision and commitment.
Indeed, I have had the privilege of working with a number of such people including Paul Polman at Unilever, the late Anita Roddick at the Body Shop and Steve Waygood at Aviva, who have certainly inspired me (and many others) and who show that by taking risks, business is able to demonstrate true leadership in the world of international politics.
The intervention of such external actors – witness Greta Thunberg or Sir David Attenborough – can also make a major impact in the atmosphere of an international summit, which makes previously unthinkable agreements possible.
It does seem that unplanned and overheard comments from HM The Queen may have been decisive in persuading Australia to attend COP26 and commit to Net Zero for the first time.
The unpredictable can happen.
But for companies, the real question behind intervention is between whether the motivation is simply predictability in influencing any impacts of the decision-making for the firm’s own prospects and markets or whether it is on the values and vision of the company and its stake in the collective outcome for all players.
At COP26, success will not come in pledges from companies and the world of finance, although there will be many of those and they are an important part of the jigsaw. Do evaluate those commitments, by the way, on whether they include scientifically-based targets to reach Net Zero (or Positive), including a graduated action plan according to a specific timetable with measurable outcomes and external verification.
What Will Rate Success?
But for the summit, success can and will be determined by how far the cumulative impact of the decisions taken brings the world back to 1.5 degrees.
There are enough clever people to tell us that at the end of this summit, but the challenge is: are there enough clever people in Glasgow to achieve it?
That is what would put Glasgow down in history.