The Copenhagen Conference should be the last of its kind.
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The NGOs attending such events are largely wasting their time and resources, for their influence is not in numbers or utterances made during the sessions but in how they have stacked the national cards through campaigning back home, that took place years or months in advance. Yes have signs of mass public concern: people gathered in the streets, are important but they need the legitimacy of being popular expression, not just protests by foreign activists assembled for the purpose. In the case of the build up to COP15 the moment to send such a signal was not at Copenhagen itself but in New York, around the UN ‘Climate Summit’ held in September 2009.
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The jet-set climate-talks format generates episodic news bites but keeps ‘climate’ (or any other topic consigned to the UN other-world) as a subject whose progress must wait for the ‘next time’. So long as NGOs persist in supporting this model, it will survive.
Campaign Strategy Newsletter No. 56 - January 2010 - Epics Issue
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