Reflections from Northwestern University's COP30 Delegation: Day 4
For a fifth year, a delegation of Northwestern University students and faculty supported by the Roberta Buffett Institute is among more than 50,000 researchers, policymakers, industry leaders, and activists at the world’s largest annual international treaty negotiations and climate summit, the 30th Conference of Parties (COP30) to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), held this year in Belém, Brazil. Each day, a different Northwestern delegate is blogging about their experiences and reflections. Day 4 features Kevin Wagner, a PhD candidate in the Department of Political Science.
Obstruction, Power Shifts, and the Unwritten Rules of the COP
I came to COP30 as someone who studies regime complexity—the ways in which international governance becomes fragmented across overlapping mandates, competing institutions, and messy lines of authority. Most of my research deals with these dynamics in theory or through documents; here, I am watching them unfold in real time. I expected institutional layering and conflicting actors. What I didn’t expect was how clearly those patterns would reveal themselves in the everyday choreography of the conference.
Moving through the sessions and pavilions this week, three features of the COP have been impossible to ignore:
- Obstruction is not incidental; it is a structured feature of the process.
One of the earliest negotiation sessions I observed was ostensibly about a small technical item, the kind of thing that should move quickly. Instead, the meeting dissolved into an extended sequence of procedural objections and symbolic alignments. Delegates challenged the order of speakers, questioned whether a paragraph could be “re-opened,” and repeated nearly identical statements simply to signal affiliation with a bloc. The effect was a complete redirection of energy away from the actual substance of the negotiation. Sitting in the room, it became obvious that obstruction operates as a low-cost, highly effective strategy. Countries that want to slow the process don’t need to argue the merits. Instead, they can simply exploit procedural ambiguity. This is regime complexity at the micro-level: fragmentation turning process into a battleground, where the structure itself generates opportunities to stall.
- China is moving assertively to fill the political and symbolic space left by a diminished U.S. presence.
This is evident long before you reach the negotiation rooms. China’s pavilion dominates the country pavilion area. This is not just in size, but in the density of programming, staff, and material. It is polished, organized, and unmistakably designed to project leadership. Delegates leave with brochures, gifts, QR codes linking to climate initiatives, and the impression that China is invested in long-term visibility here. By contrast, the United States’ absence is rarely felt. From a regime-complexity perspective, the contrast matters: influence at the COP does not arise only from negotiated text but from sustained visibility, agenda-setting, and the ability to anchor institutional expectations. China appears to understand that the physical architecture of the COP—the pavilions, the programming, the foot traffic—functions as a secondary layer of governance, which they are using to assert their leadership.
A curated volume of President Xi Jinping’s speeches on environmental governance, offered to visitors at the Chinese pavilion
- Much of the COP operates through hidden language and institutional knowledge.
On Tuesday afternoon, I met with Diana Elhard, PhD, a former Buffett delegate to COP and now an Assistant Professor at Colby College. I went in hoping to make sense of the disorientation I’d felt over the first couple of days, and it quickly became clear that this is normal for newcomers. Diana explained that understanding the COP is partly a matter of repetition: the more times you attend, the more you learn which rooms actually matter. She emphasized that simply decoding the language takes time. Every session assumes you already understand a thicket of acronyms, institutional references, and procedural shortcuts that aren’t explained anywhere. Talking with her made me realize that a large part of navigating the COP isn’t about expertise on climate issues; it’s about learning how the conference functions as its own ecosystem, with its own norms, habits, and ways of signaling what actually matters.
The bustle of activity around the COP country pavilions
Taken together, these observations have made my first days at COP30 unexpectedly clarifying. Regime complexity isn’t something abstract here. It shapes the tempo of meetings, the distribution of power, and the knowledge needed to participate meaningfully. I came expecting to see fragmentation in documents and decisions; instead, I’m seeing it in how the institution functions minute by minute.
Kevin Wagner is a second-year PhD student in the Department of Political Science. His research broadly focuses on the structure of the international regime complex for climate change. Specifically, he is interested in how this structure affects the outcomes produced by international organizations. Prior to Northwestern, he received his bachelor’s degree from Simon Fraser University and his master's from the University of Sydney.