Beyond delegation size: developing country negotiating capacity and NGO ‘support’ in international climate negotiations

Unequal negotiating capacity has been a longstanding concern for developing countries in multilateral environmental negotiations, affecting their fair and active participation in shaping outcomes. Questions over capacity have often been measured and answered through focusing on delegation size. This article argues that this approach is increasingly limited due to changing practices of non-state actor inclusion within state delegations to the UN climate change negotiations. More significantly, delegation size also obscures more subtle capacity-building efforts through specialized non-governmental organizations that have emerged to ‘support’ developing country delegations. Whilst existing research has analysed the diverse roles that NGOs play in international negotiations, NGOs whose main purpose is to provide negotiating support have been neglected and under-explored. This article addresses this neglect by presenting three brief case studies of such NGOs. It derives from these cases a typology of negotiating support NGOs to illustrate their variance in terms of the ‘range’ of issues supported and the ‘scale’ of support provided to developing countries, whilst providing directions for future research. It illustrates the ways in which NGOs also ‘perform’ diplomacy, and contributes to a more nuanced understanding of how developing countries negotiate in climate negotiations.