Performing Postcolonial Identities At The United Nations' Climate Negotiations

This study aims to understand how postcolonial identities were performed in the negotiations that led to the new climate agreement signed in Paris in December 2015. Based on interviews, the analysis of documents and participant observation of the negotiations it was possible to identify the legal, economic and scientific discourses mobilised by both global North and South countries. In all three discourses, it was possible to identify a systematic effort of the Northern parties to unmake the identity of Southern parties as developing countries' as a way to erase the ontological difference between emerging and established industrialised economies. At the same time, in the context of the convention Southern parties reaffirmed their identities as developing countries' and demanded from the North a strong commitment to tackle climate change and the transfer of more financial resources to the South. In this process, it was also possible to identify an inversion of the position usually taken by mainstream and critical postcolonial scholars that see the deconstruction of categories such as developing countries' as key for the emancipation of the global South. Finally, this invites postocolonial scholars to look more closely at how postcolonial identities are being instrumentalised, discursively and politically.