When countries gathered to begin textual negotiations on the plastics treaty, a small group soon began to question the rules of procedure. Though hard to detect behind the practised calm of negotiators, a mighty conflict was brewing.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Saudi Arabia, backed by Iran, India, Brazil and China, took the floor. They challenged a standard rule in UN negotiations that allows a decision to be passed by a two-thirds majority when consensus cannot been reached. After hours of plenary statements and rebuttals, Saudi Arabia delivered the clincher. It would \u201cnot be moving forward [with negotiations] until the rule is bracketed\u201d.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Words are bracketed in international negotiations to indicate disagreement over their inclusion in the final text. Requesting brackets at this stage was an attempt to kick voting into the long grass.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Negotiators ultimately spent two of their five days wrangling over this point, until \u2013 anxiously watching the clock \u2013 they effectively agreed to bracket the voting rule. The decision was accompanied by a statement noting the issue still hadn\u2019t been resolved, in case it came up in a future discussion. But that discussion never came, and the voting rule was never applied.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
To the treaty novice I was at the time, it wasn\u2019t immediately clear why this mattered. But treaty die-hards saw eerie echoes of what had happened at the start of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) process to negotiate curbs on greenhouse gas emissions.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Back in 1991, a group of petrochemical-rich countries wrestled the voting rules for UNFCCC negotiations into brackets, where they have now been gathering dust for 35 years. Many people told me this move has been responsible for slow action on climate change today.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Voting is standard in other multilateral environmental agreements. The High Seas Treaty, the Basel, Rotterdam and Stockholm conventions on dangerous chemicals, and the Convention on Biological Diversity, for example, all allow decisions by a majority vote.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
That being said, those UN environmental agreements that allow voting still prefer consensus, reserving voting for decision deadlocks. The desire to avoid a vote pushes countries \u201cto find common ground\u201d instead of overriding a minority, says David Azoulay, senior attorney at the Center for International Environmental Law: <\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cKnowing a vote is possible is all you need to create the incentive to actually negotiate in good faith. Because nobody wants to find themselves on the losing end of a vote.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Without that pressure, a country may simply veto a decision it dislikes, potentially due to vested interests. Where environmental issues intersect with economic interests, that is a particular risk.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
In the UNFCCC process, \u201cpetrostates succeeded in arranging consensus as the rule of procedure\u201d and have thereby stalled progress since 1991. That\u2019s according to Nona Chai, programme coordinator for the Just Transition Alliance, a coalition of environmental justice groups and labour unions.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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<\/div>Chai attended the COP30 climate conference in Brazil last year and says the no-voting norm has made it easier to block key proposals, such as language previously agreed at COP28<\/a> on \u201ctransitioning away from fossil fuels\u201d. This was opposed by Saudi Arabia and a handful of others, and ultimately removed from COP30\u2019s final text.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Many of the same countries now seem to see plastic as a way to keep extracting the fossil fuels that underpin their economies. Production limits brought on by a global plastics treaty could threaten that. What unfolded during 2023\u2019s Paris plastics talks<\/a> therefore triggered alarm bells that the same old tactics were being used.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Busan, South Korea, November 2024:<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n Journalists jostled into the press room, briefly warming the frigid air of the cavernous conference centre, where the fifth (and supposedly final) plastics treaty meeting was underway. A panel of negotiators were making a rare speech, about a proposal<\/a> to reduce global plastic production to sustainable levels.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Most country delegates, civil society representatives and scientists in attendance believed production limits were key to a successful treaty. This is in line with the 2022 UN Environment Assembly resolution<\/a> that created these negotiations. It mandated that the talks should tackle pollution across the entire plastic lifecycle. But over the preceding four meetings, countries had broadly split into factions for and against this issue.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Several factors had stoked the division. At the third meeting in Nairobi<\/a> in November 2023, a cluster of petrochemical-producing countries formed the \u201clike-minded group\u201d. It pushed for waste management over production cuts. A fourth<\/a> meeting, in Ottawa in April 2024, featured aggressive pro-plastic ad campaigns and almost 200 petrochemical lobbyists, exposing corporate influence on the process.<\/p>\n\n\n\n By the Busan meeting, the US \u2013 a major treaty player \u2013 had started rolling back its support for production cuts. (Later, under President Trump, this evolved into an allegiance with oil-rich states, and secret pressure<\/a> on countries to reject production limits.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n The press briefing in Busan made it clear that the majority was trying to keep a production limit on the negotiating table.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Wearing his trademark straw hat, Panama\u2019s lead negotiator, Juan Carlos Monterrey-Gomez, said countries opposing limits had \u201cnot moved a centimetre\u201d. He urged them to negotiate to meet the majority halfway. And with something approaching anger, he had a message for those unwilling to do so: \u201cPlease leave it to the rest of us and get out of the way.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n If anyone was looking for a sign that multilateralism was flailing, this atypical \u201cus\u201d and \u201cthem\u201d framing was it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Behind the scenes, the like-minded minority had been suggesting \u201cno text\u201d or \u201cno article\u201d on production reduction, meaning no mention of it. \u201cWhen we started to talk about the text among those of us who wanted it, they didn\u2019t want to have that conversation,\u201d Dennis Clare, a negotiator for Micronesia, told me at the time. He said they used several tactics to shut it down. \u201cIt was an impasse.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n Meanwhile, I watched as these countries kept raising the importance of consensus in plenaries and public statements \u2013 despite reportedly not engaging in the normal processes of discussion and compromise needed to reach it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n This tendency has crept into other multilateral spaces. Christiana Figueres, an architect of the 2015 Paris Agreement, told<\/a> Carbon Brief that \u201cconsensus\u201d has come to be misunderstood as \u201cunanimity\u201d. A decision doesn’t actually need the unreserved agreement of everyone. In difficult decisions of all shades consensus is achieved through flexibility and compromise, delivering a compromise that all parties are satisfied with, if not necessarily ecstatic about.<\/p>\n\n\n\n In Busan, it seemed, the fears expressed 18 months prior in Paris had become real. Without voting, a handful of countries hiding behind the cover of consensus had been emboldened to veto the majority.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Geneva, Switzerland, August 2025:<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n It was the final day of the sixth UN plastics treaty meeting, called after the fifth in Busan had failed to reach an agreement. People had been waiting hours for the final text.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Just before midnight, everyone was summoned into the vast plenary hall and an expectant hush fell. But then Luis Vayas Valdievieso<\/a>, the meeting\u2019s chair, explained the treaty was still not ready. \u201cThis plenary is adjourned!\u201d, he boomed, banging his gavel down. Almost 4,000 delegates let out a roar of frustration. At 31 seconds, it was the shortest plenary in UN history. It seemed to symbolise a process in crisis.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The anticipated text was expected to be a significant upgrade on a draft Valdievieso had released the day before, which had provoked widespread outrage and despair. It remains unclear why, but that draft barely resembled what most negotiators wanted. A section on production controls was replaced with pollution measures only, language on regulating harmful plastic chemicals was erased and the agreement was no longer legally binding.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Camila Zepeda, Mexico\u2019s lead negotiator, described that draft to me as \u201can empty shell.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n The text had been roundly rejected, pushing countries back into negotiations to try and develop another draft. That still wasn\u2019t ready by the midnight plenary on the final day. When Valdievieso gavelled that bafflingly brief plenary to a close, the meeting moved into overtime and he held informal meetings with countries to try and reach some resolution.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Ultimately, they could not agree on a final text. At a final closing plenary just after 5am, Colombia captured the sense of frustration, saying the process had been \u201cconsistently blocked by a small number of states who simply don\u2019t want an agreement\u201d. Two months later, Valdievieso resigned as chair.<\/p>\n\n\n\n How different would things be if voting had been part of this fraught process? Azoulay feels sure it would have at least brought an agreement \u201cvery, very much closer\u201d. Voting in multilateral environment agreements, intended as a last resort, has become one of the only available tools to defend multilateralism.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Having watched the process unfold, along with others I feel unsure whether voting could realistically have closed the gaping void between the countries on either side of this issue. In other words, voting is not a substitute for political will.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Fernando Tormos-Aponte, policy lead at the Just Transition Alliance, worries that a voting process might just encourage countries that dislike a negotiated outcome to leave the whole process, as the US has done with the Paris climate agreement. \u201cIf [the plastics treaty] becomes too ambitious, the US won\u2019t sign it, just like they didn\u2019t sign Kyoto and just like they eventually withdrew from Paris.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n I consulted Alexandra Harrington, chair of the International Union for Conservation of Nature\u2019s Plastic Pollution Task Force. She sees things slightly differently. Fighting harder for voting at the commencement of the plastics negotiations would have helped, Harrington says, by immediately revealing countries\u2019 true intentions.<\/p>\n\n\n\n A vote demanded by the majority in the early days of the treaty may have pushed the blockers to actually consider whether they could commit and negotiate in good faith, or if they would prefer to exit the negotiations. It also helps avoid a situation where ambition is compromised by a minority that may never even ratify the agreement.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cI think voting brings more honesty to that process,\u201d says Harrington.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Along these lines, some have suggested that those countries that do actually want a treaty \u2013 the so-called \u201ccoalition of the willing\u201d \u2013 could break out of the UN system and begin a new process among themselves. <\/p>\n\n\n\n That idea is not unique to the plastics treaty. Frustrations with the creaking, consensus-focused multilateral system also surfaced at COP30. As it ended, Colombia and the Netherlands launched<\/a> a separate global conference for nations willing to transition away from fossil fuels.<\/p>\n\n\n\n\u2018Us\u2019 and \u2018them\u2019<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
Cacophonous collapse<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
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<\/div>A vote for the future<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
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