So where are the big three? Fact is they have been missing for a long time now. Nobody noticed, until things hit rock bottom at CoP-8 with Baalu’s daft declaration. When was the last time the South took a leadership position in the climate talks? The memory requires major jogging. The closest was when Brazil tabled its proposal in Kyoto in 1997. A potentially great proposal became a CoP sideshow, and also turned into the Clean Development Mechanism (CDM). Developing countries flapped hands at the sidelines.

Since then, matters have gone decidedly downhill. Southern leaders miserably and continuously fail their people. We watch amazed and horrified as the victims of climate change keep pleading for funds from the culprits in the climate negotiations, as if they were beggars. As developing countries fight each other to sell off the rights of their future generations for peanuts under the CDM, vying to provide the industrialised world with the cheapest way to buy their way out of emission cuts! One can only marvel at the ingenuity of Northern leadership when it comes to protecting their national economic interests by drawing on somebody else’s expense account, and at the extreme stupidity of Southern leaders who allow the situation to degrade. Again and again and again and again, in negotiation after negotiation.

What goes wrong? Its political short sightedness, to begin with. While Northern politicians myopically look out for their industry, Southern leaders equally myopically believe that a fund in hand is better than a dollar in the bush. They parrot their demand for technology and finance ad nauseaum, forgetting that if they only asserted their rights, there would be no need to beg. It is particularly exasperating for Southern civil society to see their governments go conference hopping with begging bowls in front, and little else by way of preparation. Or imagination.

Then there are the disparities within the G77 itself, particularly debilitating in the climate context. This group simply does not believe in building alliances within and outside the group, and preparing common positions before a meeting. As former head of the United Nations Environment Programme Mostafa Tolba said in reaction to the group’s pathetic performance at the World Summit on Sustainable Development, it is high time the G77 pooled resources to establish a working secretariat, and hired experts to help them come better prepared for meetings.

That brings us to negotiating capacities. The climate convention is an increasingly scientific and technical negotiation, where one or two bureaucrats represent developing countries, and cannot respond to complex proposals put forward at the last minute. This is not always for want of technical capacity. Certainly not in India. It is simply the inability of governments to involve even existing experts in any meaningful manner in evolving national positions.

None of these problems are irresolvable. But the virtual exclusion of people in forming national positions has meant that governments make decisions in isolation. Leaders no longer represent people, and so end up taking an issue as serious and emotive as climate change, to produce a dead draft that includes every international cliché and reads like a high school essay.