Government Participation in Virtual Negotiations: Evidence From the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change Approval Sessions, 2023-2025

The Covid-19 pandemic challenged global governance in unprecedented ways by requiring intergovernmental meetings to be held online. For the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), this meant that the intergovernmental approval of the key findings of the Sixth Assessment Report (AR6) had to be conducted virtually.

In this research, we assess how the move away from face-to-face meetings affected country participation in IPCC approval sessions. Our findings demonstrate that virtual meetings increased the size of member governments’ delegations, but this did not necessarily translate into a greater number of interventions during the approval of the Summary for Policymakers (SPM) as time zone differences reduced engagement levels significantly—particularly for countries from the Pacific, East Asian, and Latin American regions whose delegations often found themselves in IPCC meetings late at night and early in the morning.

These results offer initial, empirically robust evidence about what online meetings can and cannot achieve for promoting more inclusive global governance at a time when the IPCC and other organizations reflect on the future use of virtual and hybrid meeting formats.

The data used in this analysis relies on three original sources.

First, we source information about country delegations for IPCC AR5 and AR6 for all three Working Group (WG) reports and the Synthesis Report from publicly available session documents published by the IPCC Secretariat. Session information and links to these documents are provided in Appendix B of the Climatic Change publication. These data allow us to create measures of the size of country delegations, which meetings they attended, and the gender breakdown of each delegation.

Second, we use country mentions from Earth Negotiations Bulletin (ENB) reports for IPCC Approval Plenary meetings for WGII and WGIII during AR6. These are available from the ENB website. We use this information to create our engagement measure.

Third, we use information from the daily schedules from IPCC Approval Plenaries for WGII and WGIII mettings during AR6. As accredited researchers, we had access to these documents which allowed us to create a data set that record which negotiation item/headline statement was negotiated when. Combining these data with information about time zones in each delegation's home country, allows us to analyse the effect of time zones on engagement of delegations in IPCC intergovernmental negotiations.

新冠疫情以史无前例的态势对全球治理构成挑战，要求所有政府间会议以线上形式开展。对于政府间气候变化专门委员会（Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, IPCC）而言，这意味着其第六次评估报告（Sixth Assessment Report, AR6）核心结论的政府间审议批准工作必须以线上方式进行。

本研究旨在评估脱离线下会议的线上模式，对IPCC审议会议中国家参与度的影响。研究结果显示，线上会议提升了成员国代表团的规模，但在政策制定者摘要（Summary for Policymakers, SPM）的审议批准过程中，代表团的发言次数并未随之增加——这是因为时区差异显著降低了参与度，尤其是太平洋、东亚及拉美地区的国家，其代表团往往需要在深夜或凌晨参与IPCC会议。

在IPCC及其他机构反思未来线上与混合式会议模式的当下，本研究结果为探讨线上会议在推动更具包容性的全球治理方面的效能边界，提供了首批具备实证稳健性的证据。

本分析所使用的数据来源于三类原始资料。

首先，我们从IPCC秘书处公开发布的会议文件中，提取了IPCC第五次评估报告（AR5）与第六次评估报告（AR6）全部三个工作组（Working Group, WG）报告及综合报告的国家代表团相关信息。上述文件的会议信息与链接可在《Climatic Change》期刊论文的附录B中获取。通过这些数据，我们可以构建多项衡量指标：包括国家代表团规模、参会会议类型，以及各代表团的性别构成情况。

其次，我们从《地球谈判公报》（Earth Negotiations Bulletin, ENB）关于AR6期间第二工作组（WGII）与第三工作组（WGIII）IPCC审议全会的报告中，提取各国被提及的相关信息，该类报告可从ENB官网获取。我们利用这些信息构建参与度衡量指标。

最后，我们使用AR6期间WGII与WGIII的IPCC审议全会的每日日程信息。作为认证研究人员，我们可获取这些文件，借此构建数据集，记录各项谈判议题/核心声明的谈判时序。将此类数据与各代表团所在国的时区信息相结合，我们便可分析时区对IPCC政府间谈判中代表团参与度的影响。