Take for instance, the Clean Development Mechanism (CDM), the jiggery-pokery that metamorphosed from a perfectly good proposal for a clean development fund, and jumped out of the dark nights of Kyoto. Even developing country governments were hardly given the time to understand what was being asked of them, before being given the ultimatum of either accepting it, or taking responsibility for the collapse of the climate negotiations. When did civil society, particularly civil society from developing countries, ever have a say in whether they wanted the CDM in the first place?

Just like the Kyoto Protocol, they were left to make the best of what they were given. Initial rejection turned to helpless acceptance. While some Southern representatives tried to demand — are still demanding — that the rules of CDM be somehow fashioned to meet at least some of their needs, others settled down to receive the sop of money that was thrown in, for either brokering or carrying out projects. Right and wrong went out of the window, as they became partners in a mechanism that was literally bartering their future for peanuts.

This has been happening in other global environmental negotiations, legally binding or otherwise. Despite protests from a global society that knew from experience that collaborating with industry was akin to entering into a pact with the devil, the UN, the last hope for neutrality from shortsighted economics for many poor countries, entered into a Global Compact with corporations. More recently, vox populi suffered another cold shoulder at the World Summit on Sustainable Development. They opposed voluntary, mostly bilateral partnerships, but a list of such deals still formed part of the final package. While some simply tried to ignore the partnerships, hoping they would fade away for lack of attention, others were tempted by promises of lucre to participate in deals that could eventually hammer the final nail in the coffin of multilateralism.

Come to think of it, we didn’t have much of a say with the Kyoto Protocol either — we were just left to defend a drivelling document, driven by desperation into believing that it was the best we would get, all things considered.

CoP-8 is the appointed scene of an important discussion that will have a direct impact on local communities. This is the discussion on sinks. We were not able to keep sinks out of CDM despite the associated uncertainties. Yet again, we are driven to desperately seek a silver lining. There is potential. Sinks could be the one way of ensuring that not all CDM proceeds line the pockets of the rich in industrialised countries (to broker, verify and monitor CDM) and the rich in developing countries (to design and carry out the projects).

The one way of ensuring that profits from trading go directly to local communities, and benefit them by creating livelihoods, is to ensure that the rules for sinks give them total control. Not simply a meek sentence asking that communities participate — that much abused word, the dictionary meaning of which should be changed to "I dictate, you participate" ever since institutions such as the World Bank appropriated it to gain social acceptance for their work. Instead, communities should truly be given the upper hand in sinks projects. In this, we cannot accept any last minute surprises.

The scene of CoP-8 — in a developing country with a high potential for sinks projects and a large population of local communities directly dependant on forests, where several local communities are represented — puts civil society at an advantage to drive this point home. If we don’t make sure this happens, then it is time we had a serious rethink about our future in UN negotiations that give us so little say in the fashioning of our future.