What a bracket!
As negotiators pulled their third consecutive sleepless night in Paris, those of us watching remotely—and indeed members of civil society on site—contented ourselves with the occasional tweet from inside closed-door sessions, and mulling over the last draft text released to the public.
The final Paris text has two parts: a formal Agreement with 29 articles, and a longer decision text of 140 paragraphs, describing actions to be taken by a variety of UNFCCC-related bodies in order to implement the Agreement.
For those of us in ESD.S30, watching the evolution of this text (as well as periodic updates published by contact groups focused on specific articles of the Agreement in week 1 of the COP) has been fascinating—but also unnecessarily difficult, despite the existence of entire websites devoted to ‘deconstructing’ these documents.
[Maybe [not]]
Among many other things — a tense negotiation, a convention of tens of thousands of people, an historic gathering of heads of state, a party, a cultural event, a historical milestone, a social media phenomenon — Paris is also an exercise in collective authorship. The “non-paper” emerging from the last Bonn meeting of the ADP was 54 pages; the final draft agreement, 31. More telling than the reduced length is the elimination of—by some estimates—more than a thousand brackets in the 11 November document.
In the text, brackets were used to denote alternate language that had been proposed by a party or group at the negotiations: “[shall][should]” (note no space) indicated a choice of alternate language (here between a binding requirement and a strong, yet voluntary recommendation). On the other hand, words and phrases that could be included or omitted, were in single sets of brackets separated by spaces: “I’d like to order the [escargot,] [coq au vin,] [[and] crème brûlée].” could denote an order of one, two, or three items. Brackets were heavily nested, with the whole agreement at times in perhaps gratuitous brackets.
The use of brackets is what’s called a markup language, developed in an ad-hoc way by international negotiators to suit their needs, knowledge, and skills.
Perhaps the best known markup language is HTML, the Hypertext Markup Language used nearly everywhere on the Internet. One distinction between “FCCC Brackets” and HTML is that the latter has a formal specification, a careful description of the meaning of all forms markup. FCCC Brackets do not; as a result, my second example above could also denote the non-sentence, “I’d like to order the.”
Brackets impose a mental burden
Over the past two weeks, we have found deciphering the state-of-play to be challenging in at least three ways:
- The reader (you or I, or a person in the room at Le Bourget) must parse each sentence—noting spaces in small-print text, which as mentioned encode specific meaning—then assemble a mental model of all possible sentences which emerge from combinations of the bracketed text. This involves, first, ruling out ungrammatical combinations; second, ruling out grammatical sentences that are incoherent, for instance obliging parties to do two mutually exclusive things; and finally, ruling out combinations for which no party has stated specific support.
- Regarding such support, FCCC Brackets do not provide easy connections to the history of editing, or information on which parties added specific text. For instance, the Bonn non-paper includes (Pp10 on p.2): “Emphasizing the importance of respecting and taking into account … human rights, [including people under occupation], gender equality…” Who asked for this bracketed phrase to be included? Perhaps representatives of a territory or people—say, Palestine?—that some consider to be occupied, or negotiators from another, sympathetic country? As presented, this information is unavailable, and can only be inferred from background knowledge.
- Interested observers following the development of particular parts of the text must identify and connect with one another independently. For instance, one arriving at the text of Article 13 (Article 11 in the drafts), on transparency, must go to a search engine and make an independent effort to locate others who are scrutinizing the same paragraphs.
Better living, through technology
Technologists and coders have been discussing markup since the 1970s; long before the 1989 advent of the World Wide Web. Academic researchers have developed hundreds of software packages for engaging with texts, including tools for collaboratively and openly annotating any page on the Web. Collaborative online editing is behind Wikipedia, and public comment software was used to develop version 3 of the GNU General Public License, which, in turn, governs much free software.
Even closer to the COP, authors have noted that a simple Google Doc—in all its unedited glory—was at times the best record of the ADP’s work in the first week of the conference.
With the constellation of examples in view, it is easy to imagine a markup language for FCCC texts which provides, or supports software through which:
- Individual paragraphs can be linked directly with short URLs (as on the U.S. Federal Register website);
- Negotiators and observers can attach private or public metadata (including attribution) to any part of the text, which move with text as sections and paragraphs are deleted, added or renumbered;
- References to other paragraphs, articles, and phrases are updated automatically;
- A computer can parse and display to a user all feasible combinations of bracketed text; and more.
There are, of course, reservations and particular needs that such a markup/annotation/collaborative authoring system must work around. For instance, the Google Doc mentioned earlier covered ADP discussions that were supposedly in camera, and an official system must avoid sanctioning any violations of confidence. Also, negotiators, coming from every country in the world, have their own computing abilities and requirements, and must not be forced to use a common platform—nor should civil society, for many of whom accessibility is important.
Yet it is still important to ask, going forward, whether careful, tailored applications of existing or new digital technologies could help lubricate the FCCC process; and whether these could eliminate some duplicative or needless mental effort on the part of sleep-deprived negotiators…and MIT students!
