Bargaining Resources and Strategies in Climate Change Negotiations

1 Governments dispose of two instruments – resources and activities to increase their impact in international negotiations. Apart from exogenous negotiation resources such as economic weight, states try to increase their endogenous resources by staffing their diplomatic delegations, by including various representatives of NGOs, research or the business community or by choosing experienced delegation leaders. Regarding their behaviour, governments show different levels of activity in the negotiations by intervening during the negotiations, by organising side events and by opting for different sorts of bargaining strategies, e.g. value-claiming versus value-creating or hard versus soft bargaining. This paper first discusses the resources different governments dispose of, and demonstrates that they try to compensate a lack of bargaining resources with their negotiation behaviour. Second, more light is shed on the specific determinants of hard or soft bargaining tactics. Drawing from the negotiation theoretic literature on the use of strategies and an original dataset of interview data on the use of bargaining strategies of 58 delegations in the UNFCCC negotiations, we find that economic power and pressure from domestic stakeholders – in particular in democracies – are most helpful to explain the choice of bargaining strategies.