What is it about?

Multilateral negotiations on worldwide challenges have grown in importance with rising global interdependence. Yet, they have recently proven slow to address these challenges successfully. This article discusses the questions which have arisen from the highly varying results of recent multilateral attempts to reach cooperation on some of the critical global challenges of our times. These include the long-awaited UN climate change summit in Copenhagen, which ended without official agreement in 2009, and the summit in Cancún one year later, attaining at least moderate tangible results. Using in-depth empirical analysis, the article examines the determinants of success or failure in efforts to form regimes and manage the process of multilateral negotiations.

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Why is it important?

The article draws on data from 62 interviews with organizers and chief climate and trade negotiators to discover what has driven delegations in their final decision on agreement, finding that with negotiation management, organisers hold a powerful tool in their hands to influence multilateral negotiations. This comprehensive negotiation framework, its comparison across cases and the rich and first-hand empirical material from decision-makers make this invaluable reading for students and scholars of politics, international relations, global environmental governance, climate change and international trade, as well as organizers and delegates of multilateral negotiations. This research has been awarded the German Mediation Scholarship Prize for 2014 by the Center for Mediation in Cologne.

Perspectives

"Structures of power and interest, shaped by domestic politics, tightly constrain international negotiations. Yet How Effective Negotiation Management Promotes Multilateral Cooperation shows in fascinating and well-researched detail how the quality of negotiation leadership both varies a great deal across negotiations and affects the processes that ensue." –Robert O. Keohane, Professor of Public and International Affairs, Princeton University

Dr Kai Monheim
London School of Economics and Political Science

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This page is a summary of: The ‘Power of Process:’ How Negotiation Management Influences Multilateral Cooperation, International Negotiation, September 2016, Brill,
DOI: 10.1163/15718069-12341341.
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