Our Civic Diplomacy Program is oriented toward connecting our education and empowerment work to international decision-making spaces that affect lives, rights, livelihoods, and future climate stability, but where citizens and stakeholders are often underrepresented.
CCI coordinates the Citizens’ Climate delegation in the UNFCCC process, as well as engagement with other multilateral development institutions and United Nations processes. Through that work, we have identified a number of critical areas where high-value engagement requires a multidisciplinary approach to training, coordination, and strategic engagement with the diplomatic process.
Our Civic Diplomacy work includes:
- Lifting up stakeholders in multilateral processes—such as the G7, G20, meetings of the World Bank and International Monetary Fund, and efforts toward the Sustainable Development Goals, including around food systems transformation
- Our UNFCCC delegation—At the COP26 in Glasgow, our team had more than 50 bilateral meetings and helped connect stakeholders to negotiators, minsters, and heads of state, while connecting those not in attendance to the process.
- Action for Climate Empowerment (ACE)—the civic engagement and public information agenda within the UNFCCC process, where CCI is a leading voice for non-Party stakeholders and for climate action leadership outside of government
- The Engage4Climate Toolkit—a stakeholder consultation system, developed through our ACE activities, allowing stakeholders anywhere to organize structured meetings and deliver policy guidance to decision-makers
This program is intended to overlap with our other programs:
- Connecting volunteers to high-level decision-makers, and expanding the civic space through activation of the Five Levers for Building Political Will;
- Advocating for people-centered carbon pricing in multilevel engagment spaces like the Carbon Pricing Leadership Coalition;
- Supporting the integration of science insights into non-science data systems to provide resilience intelligence, to drive climate-smart finance and policy-making.
On the Road to COP27, we are working to support progress on:
- Including the voices of stakeholders in processes that will decide their future;
- Concrete work toward a universally applicable Global Goal on Adaptation (GGA);
- Non-market approaches to global decarbonization under Paris Article 6.8;
- Integrating food systems transformation into NDCs and into international cooperation for a resilient, low-carbon future;
- Mainstreaming of climate-smart finance, including new funding for Adaptation, Resilience, and Loss and Damage.
Embracing Complexity, Sharing Insight
We recognize that to ensure the most effective engagement in multilateral policy-making, in the face of climate emergency and while working toward 17 Sustainable Development Goals—which the member states of the United Nations General Assembly agreed in 2015 are the rightful expectation of all people—we must embrace complexity.
- The annual UN Climate Change negotiating process is, by its nature and due to the complexity of the intersecting areas of the agenda, an evolving landscape of emerging possibility.
- Even as rules and goals are being set, the overall process is intended to welcome new and additional insight and resources, year to year, and is always intended to be grounded in the action nation states are taking to foster climate resilience and reduce the overall global threat of dangerous climate change.
- While an annual consensus agreement may not include a global mandate for all nations to act on our own top priorities, success can be achieved by ensuring vital concepts, avenues of action, and opportunities for future leadership are anchored in the agreed language.
The future of intergovernmental policy-making must be multidisciplinary, multilevel, and inclusive. Given our experience as constructive observers, and our position at the center of a global network of stakeholders, we are now co-convening a series of Climate Diplomacy Workshops with the Fletcher School at Tufts University, intended to cultivate this way of working and bring more diverse perspectives into decision-making spaces.
