From Declarations to Delivery: How Climate Diplomacy Works | ft.  Madhura Joshi

[Podcast intro]

Welcome to the season five of the India Energy Hour podcast. This podcast explores the most pressing hurdles and promising opportunities of India energy transition through an in depth discussion on policies, financial markets, social movements and science. Your hosts for this episode are Shreya Jai, Delhi based energy and climate journalist and Dr. Sandeep Pai, Washington based energy transition researcher and author. The show is produced by 101 reporters, a pan India network of grassroots reporters that produces original stories from rural India. If you like our podcast, please rate us on Spotify, Apple Podcasts or the platform where you listen to our podcast. Your support will help us reach a larger audience.

As the impacts of climate change intensify and clean energy deployment becomes crucial, energy and climate diplomacy have emerged as powerful tools to drive international cooperation and unlock finance, technology, and ambition. From global summits like COP, G7, and G20, to bilateral and multilateral partnerships, countries are negotiating entire frameworks for energy access, green industrial growth, and just transitions.

But how does climate diplomacy actually work? What are the real levers for influencing outcomes in a fragmented, multipolar world? And once big declarations are made, how do we ensure follow-through and accountability on the ground?

To unpack these questions, we speak with Madhura Joshi, Programme Lead – Asia Hub at E3G. Madhura is an expert in international energy and climate negotiations.

[end]

[Podcast interview]

Sandeep Pai: Madhura, welcome to the India Energy Hour. We have been meaning to have you for a long time, but and I’m also surprised why we haven’t had you, but so really welcome. I’m excited to talk to you about diplomacy, and it’s a topic that many people want to know, but many people don’t know how to do. So I think we’ll learn a lot. So welcome.

Madhura Joshi: Thank you so much. And thank you so much, Sandeep and, Sheya, for having me on the show. I’ve been an avid listener of your podcast, and, it’s really an honor to be here. And thank you so much. Yes. And I think even folks who work on diplomacy will probably say that they still are not very sure how exactly this works, but they are plotting along nonetheless.

Sandeep Pai: Right. Right. Wonderful. Okay. So I think, you know, I wanna start with you, Madhur, as a person. Like, where are you from? What’s your journey? How did you, like, kind of land up in the topic of diplomacy and more generally energy climate, but, you know, over time, sort of hone in your skills on one or two specific topics, which is what everybody does. But, so, yeah, tell us about your story.

Madhura Joshi: Interesting. So energy climate wasn’t something that I initially had, like, planned to start off with. I am a Mumbai girl. We’ve moved around a little bit as, when I was a kid, we moved around in different parts of India. I was in Kolkata, Chennai, etc, but largely, I’ve spent my life in Mumbai. I did my bachelor’s in political science at Xavier’s college. And, when I was studying, I had also taken literature. I had political science and economics, and I was equally interested in all of it. I love languages as well. And somehow the like, there were a few areas that emerged as really in, of interest to me. One was at looking at, you know, how do you what work can you do to try and sort of understand better the social challenges? And it’s much later that you know, the political economy language and framing is something that I got to understand better over the course of my education and work. But how do you understand the social challenges and the world that you live in little bit better? And it also got me sort of interested in, you know, international relations. How, you know, what how do countries talk to each other? What happens at these venues? And, of course, when you’re an undergrad without knowing what multilateral institutions actually do, it does seem like a really fascinating world to inhabit. So when I was looking to do my masters, I was sort of looking at both international relations development studies. I did my masters. I’ve chosen, like, you know, sort of in between international political economy and did my master’s at LSE. And, this was towards the sort of end of the financial crisis. I was looking at opportunities for employment after LSE. London was definitely a lot more difficult at that point of time, also for someone without any work experience. And then all since I wanted to do more of also, you know, understanding the world that we live in, it made sense for me to look at options in India. And, for me, the entry point into international relations, international political economy, a large part of it was also, like, the tussle that you would have around energy. Right? The wars that have happened around energy resources, etc etc. So that’s something that I was like, okay. Maybe there’s that some little connection. And I was fortunate to get, like, you know, I saw an opening, and my first job was, with, Gateway House. It was in, Gateway House as an emerging think tank now, a really vibrant one, in, based in Mumbai that was looking at foreign relations. And when I was like, I I did a small stint over there. And, while working on at back then was the TAPI pipeline, Turkmenistan, Afghanistan, Pakistan, India pipeline, and trying to understand, you know, what is that what why is this not happening? How do you sort of you know, what does how does natural gas trade happen? How do countries talk to each other? It sort of made me realize that I think I needed to not just understand the politics between different countries, but I needed to know better about the energy sectors myself to be able to talk or to be able to even, you know, grasp then the second layer of politics that happened without knowing what your sectors itself are. It’s sort of challenging. And given that, when I started working almost fifteen years back, you don’t have this proliferation of think tanks. The space was quite new. You basically like, in the Indian context, at least, you had development folks that were at least in Mumbai, you had the test folks, and then you had advertising and finance and, consultancy folks. Right? So it was there was never this full understanding of what civil society can actually do or what think tanks actually do as well. But there was this one large piece that a lot of the policy related governance related work typically would happen in Delhi, and that’s where you build your sort of chops as well because you’re trying to influence national government policy. So that took me, looking at opportunities. I got my full my substantive energy role, I would say, first was with the Energy and ResourcesInstitute. I started on a project on global energy governance and understanding what that is, mapping institutions, etc. And then, sort of when like, I realized that that space is still something that for me to make something tangible out of it, let’s look at what sectoral issues are. So then I started looking at you know, it starts with energy security because that was the entry point into international global governance. So energy security in the domestic context has worked a lot more and had the opportunity to work on projects that looked at the oil and gas governance and challenges in the country, coal, renewables, nuclear. So that helped in getting the most sectoral national aspect. And sort of I went deeper and deeper to understand again the energy access part of it. So over the roles, basically, I would say that it’s been, like, starting with very without understanding what global governance international relations is, starting with that, trying to get more sectoral understanding, working then at the state level, working on energy access issues, to now sort of coming back full circle to again start looking at with this more deeper understanding of domestic political economy context, the challenges that we have of development, growth, and, of addressing climate change to now sort of bring that up into how now diplomacy can play a role, how the countries can play a role, and actually moving things forward, creating those frameworks so that change can also happen on the ground. So that’s been sort of the journey. I was with Terry, then I was with CPR where I really honed, I think, my research skills. Then I was at Natural Resources Defense Council leading their work on energy access, green jobs, and climate policy. And in the current role with EPG, I’m their, program lead for our work on, energy transitions, diplomacy clean energy transitions diplomacy, for Asia, managing the work in Japan, Indonesia, and India.

Shreya Jai: Before we get into much more, micro aspects of what you do and, what it results into, can you just give a broad idea to our audience, what energy diplomacy actually is? What does it comprise of? And and if you can, you know, share some examples or anecdotes for that matter, which would, you know, make it easy for all of us to understand.

Madhura Joshi: So I’ll try with a little bit of a, sort of one just background on energy diplomacy and then how energy and climate have linked with a little bit of history because researcher roots are sometimes difficult to let go of. So in very simple terms, energy diplomacy can be looked at as, like, you know, the drivers for energy diplomacy is for a country trying to sort of look at strengthening its energy security, ensuring sufficiency, stability of supply, and affordability. And, I mean, on on the simplistic terms in the past, it would be looked at as buyers and sellers. If you are a buyer, you want to try and build relationships with sellers that give you preferable preferential terms. If it is on a bilateral contract, or you want rules of the game as such that, you know, there is equal playing field. And if you’re a seller, you want to ensure that your product, your energy has as many buyers as possible and you get the best possible sort of rate and returns for it. Then you have the plurilateral space, right, where it’s about regional trade and establishing the rules of the game. It can be in the ASEAN context, in, like, Latin American, context, or how European, you know, markets on energy have also evolved. And then there is the multilateral space on energy diplomacy, which has been also about, like, you know, what what are the oversight mechanisms and how do you ensure that, you know, the rules of the game are followed. But I would say that energy diplomacy, of course, traditionally has been separate completely from climate diplomacy, and the two have sort of seen a convergence, I would say, only fairly recently. But the way in which I’ve understood how energy diplomacy has grown from just bilateral trade to getting more countries to talk to each other has been sometimes as a response to threats or security concerns. Right? So you had the one of the earlier ones that sort of, you know, first oil shock of 1973 led to the formation of the International Energy Alliance and OLED with the aim of, you know, trying to lessen supply disruptions. Latin American countries felt that there’s also a need for them to pull you know, coordinate on action, coordinate their sort of policies. So that led to OLED being formed. Of course, before, I IEA was the formation of OPEC, and that happened at a time where, you know, oil prices were at a really low. So supply suppliers came together to say that, you know, we need to have a minimum oil sort of price for us to make, benefit for all to make benefits. So they had, you know, quotas come into place. In some sense also, you know, what is how you look at ways in which profits are maximized for everyone? So all of that sort of back and forth. We had OPEC being formed, IE and OLED coming off from, like, the buyer side as a response to the, you know, oil price fluctuations and the tensions around, like, oil wars and oil sort of resources, etcetera. And that sort of, was perhaps, like, 20th century, I would say, was dominated by more or less your fossil fuel institutions or organizations that were looking at, you know, trying to mitigate the tensions, ensure diversification of supplies, etc. And, I would say that, like, it’s more in the twenty first century where you realize increasingly that, there is a gap of organizations and platform that the multilateral level that address climate sufficiently enough, that talk about renewables sufficiently enough. Even though you had the UNF triple c being formed in 1992, it didn’t really talk about energy, till almost, I would say, 2015 and then 2021. Right? So, essentially, we’ve seen now increasingly didn’t you know, in the twenty first century, more institutions being created that talk specifically about clean energy and how do you cooperate around that. Also, the linkages between climate, energy, finance coming into place, like energy becoming a mainstay of conversations even in you know, platforms that were designed to talk about finance like g 20 or g seven that emerged as a in response to a crisis. So I’d say that energy diplomacy has started off with more in terms of securing supplies for yourself and ensuring energy security, which has been through either diversification of sources, diversification of suppliers, or diversification or or of through, like, trade establishing trade. And that’s sort of now evolved into also understanding better that how climate energy sort of, you know, collate together. And now very closely, climate diplomacy and energy diplomacy, I would say, are now two sides of the same coin.

Shreya Jai: Interesting that you mentioned that now energy and climate diplomacy are part of the same coin because I wanted to get this understanding. Energy diplomacy over the last decade, as you said, pinned on fossil fuels, and that’s what made it sexy, if I may say so, because there’s so much of geopolitics involved. There’s so many uncanny countries, and there are weird leaders involved in that discussions. But now with renewables coming in the game and along with it, you know, climate action, etcetera, the whole discourse has changed. You have to convince the naysayers in the first place, then you have to convince that it works, then you have to convince that gas is maybe a bridge fuel. So the whole discourse has changed. So given that you have, you know, covered the whole gamut in the last fifteen years, first, how do you cope with it? Second, what is this change in dialogue that you’re witnessing?

Madhura Joshi: Yeah. That’s a good question. And you’re right. I mean, energy security was sexy. That’s the reason why also, like, you know, there’s so much geopolitics and intel happening. That’s what, you know, attracted me at least to this international relations space and then took me down the rabbit hole to get back up again. But, essentially, I would say that in a sense, I feel our understanding of energy security has also changed. Right? And it’s changed also because of the material changes that we are seeing in our lifespan itself. And on some level, I would say that the tensions have always played out between climate and fossil interest. Like, just to hop back, 1992 roughly was when you had UNF triple the Rio Summit that led to the emergence of, UNF triple c. In that time, they had sort of, acknowledged that fossil fuels is a challenge, but they’ve not condemned it because you didn’t also have alternate technologies at that point of time that could help in, you know, reducing the extent of reliance on fossil fuels. But since then, we’ve seen countries push back. Quite often, you would have the large oil producers, the OPEC and The US and all pushing back against mentioning specifically the role of energy in creating the climate crisis itself. Actually, a lot of effort has also gone into creating that body of work at the scientific community level on the impact of human activity on climate change and then energy the raw share of energy in climate change itself. So I think that the evolution of it now is that, first, there is a tacit understanding that energy security approaches now have changed. You cannot necessarily you cannot rely on fossil fuels to give you that sense of energy security. Even if you may have, like, in the oil space, a more diversified, liquid sort of market, you have many more suppliers. We’ve and we’ve also seen, like, the prices fluctuate massively. We are seeing basically that these are the largest contributors to your climate change. And, I mean, maybe oil is a poor example to start off with because that’s probably going to get phased out the latest. But at least when you see with gas and with, with coal, etcetera as well, that these are not necessarily the only routes for strengthening your energy security. And in fact, experiences have shown with geopolitical tensions, etcetera, that betting on clean energy might strengthen your energy security. So, yes, it’s sort of diversified the voices, but I think it’s also made it a little bit more of an equal playing field in some sense because, no. I mean, I won’t say fully equal, but it’s sort of increased the number of voices that are there. Because earlier with your fossil resources, the concentration was quite heavy, and you had the buyers and suppliers. Here, you do have now questions around renewable energy security, supply chains, etcetera. But once you have the installation in your backyard, it’s the security that the country has is much higher. So I would say that, yes, it’s made it more complex because it’s also now about changing systems from over the last fifty years, hundred years that have been built on fossils to move towards a different sort of technology. And we’ve seen technology trans transitions happen over a period of time, which has never been a smooth path. But we know that these changes need to happen both to sort of protect your physical security from climate risks perspective, but also to strengthen now from your energy security and affordability perspectives because these are now the more competitive technologies of the future. So it’s diversified voices, and you’re seeing sort of the winners and losers play out quite actively on the, on the, negotiating spaces. Winners and losers in terms of, you know, who are the erstwhile producers, who are the erstwhile buyers, the new emerging producers of clean energy sources as well, as well as those who are likely to get the most affected by climate impacts if the transitions don’t happen soon enough. So I think, the space has become a lot. The geopolitics still exist. I think they’ve just gotten a lot more complicated because there are multiple challenges that are being dealt with with multiple stakeholders and voices having a bigger and bigger say.

Sandeep Pai: Thank you, Madhurrah. This is super interesting how you explained the changing landscape of obviously energy and then, you know, underneath or underneath, the changing landscape of energy and climate diplomacy. I just want to start with some one on one here. So, explain to me, like, with these changing platform with these changing sort of, like, dynamics within the diplomacy world, you know, what are some platforms, international, multilateral platforms that one can use to leverage clean energy transitions? And how are they different? For example, g 20 or g COP, etcetera. So how are they different? What does each do?

Madhura Joshi: Yeah. That’s a good question. And I think I will now delve a little bit like, move away a bit from the past and talk a little bit more about the present as well because I clearly, otherwise, miss out on really landmark pieces. So I would like I think you started with the key sort of platforms. I would say that COP and UNF triple under the UNF triple framework, COPs are one of the most dominant ones for climate and energy diplomacy. And the reason why I say it’s the most dominant one is also because international commitments are both sort of an indication of political will, but also reflect sometimes your life changes. And the commitments that you make at the international level in some form or the especially at the UN, the UNF triple c, where you have countries bought into the COP process, these sort of then manifest in some form either as a parliament act of parliament into domestic laws, or they get incorporated in policies, and that’s how we sort of see changes happening. So, to give you the more recent example, we know about the Paris agreement that was that, you know, countries agreed upon in 2015 to and, you know, to work together to limit temperature rise global temperature rise, to under two degrees with efforts to keep it at 1.5 degrees Celsius by the end of the century. And as a part of this, they agreed to submit nationally determined contributions. Now because these are nationally determined contributions and they have an ambition increase or ambition ratcheting up process built into place, what come countries are submitting are something that they will need to sort of show how they’re progressing. And in most cases, it has have also been translated into how they it’ll enact in domestic policies. And you also have then acts of parliament that, you know, ratify, acts parliament at the state at the country level that ensure that, you know, there’s progress happening on that. So I think COP is remains the most critical one, but there are, of course, a lot now. G7 is another, platform, and this is specifically for, for monitoring the actions of G7 countries. And we’ve seen some sort of progress in that as well to give a few specific examples. Your g seven countries agreeing to, stop funding fossil fuels internationally. They haven’t made the domestic commitment yet, but that was one of the commitments that they made. We also looked at making a commitment on, predominantly decarbonized power sector for their for their power sectors by 2035. And more importantly, on I won’t say more importantly, the conversations around just energy transition partnerships is also something that emerged, within the g seven context. So that’s also been, in the past, an important one. I think how important platforms are also vary a little bit based on country politics and dynamics that end up happening at that space. In the current context with The US pulling out, we don’t know what the future of G7 could look like. G20 is also really, has been very useful. Though it was formed as a response to the Asian financial crisis, I would say the g twenty has been more effective in, bringing about coordination and financial regulations in market, whereas the energy and climate space has been more of a signaling and ambition setting space, which also of has benefits. Right? So I would use the example of the Indian G20. That’s where we, for the first time, got the language around tripling RE, doubling energy efficiency. And there was also this huge tussle that happened between, you know, top 20 nations on whether to commit on fossil fuel phase down, phase out, etcetera. And I think it sort of laid the groundwork towards what we saw coming up in Dubai later that year at the COP, around the sort of g the Dubai consensus, which which had that landmark agreement of countries agreeing to transition away from fossil fuels and the recommitment of tripling re doubling energy efficiency by 2030. So these are definitely important platforms. But I’ll just end with saying that beyond these three, I think, especially in the current context, we are also seeing energy and climate becoming a core part of, you know, new plurilateral initiatives as well. Just the recently concluded, BRICS for the first time had, like, a a point around, had their sort of declaration around energy and climate. And this is something that’s going to be, part of, you know, your finance of of all sort of platforms, whether from a finance angle, mobilizing finance, rules for, you know, accounting for climate risks of financial institutions, whether it’s from, like, physical security. Even in the UN Security Council, there have been conversations around climate as a security risk and, of course, around trade platforms when it comes to clean energy trade, etcetera, etcetera. So it’s going to end up becoming a part of almost every conversation, and it’ll be difficult to step away from climate at any point.

Sandeep Pai: Yeah. It’s become so embedded. So I wanna clear something up top for our audience. Like, yes, these declarations happen, but it doesn’t are they legally binding? You know, like, one of the big wins of diplomacy, and correct me if I’m wrong, is to get the kind of declaration you were talking about tripling renewables, you know, energy efficiency, or jet pea deals. But then you have to do the hard work of implementation. So how does both connect? Like, just because a country goes and declares something in G20 or UNFCCC, What what is bare at bare minimum happens when that declaration happens, and what is the best case scenario?

Madhura Joshi: Yeah. So I think I would sort of defer it in different way. I would sort of split them in slightly different ways and to the best of my understanding. The G20 declarations sometimes can especially when they come to around energy, etcetera, are not binding. The language also that you see is very, we will try and do this to the best of our ability, etcetera, etcetera. And there are no monitoring mechanisms, etcetera, that have been put in place in the G20 when it comes to these comes to, energy and climate. However, when we look at it from a cop, It’s both it’s a commitment that leaders are making at an international platform. They are binding to the but not following them or like in the case of The US, if they pulled out of the Paris agreement now twice, they may not be penalties for not following it. And the penalties happen more in the sense I think the impact of the penalties will differ on how big a power you are as well, how big a country you are. And the second is more loss of faith. The third is, I think, also peer pressure. Because you if you have large countries that are sort of pulling out of action, either things collapse completely or now we are seeing, you know, a little bit more of a mobilization of other actors coming together to work. So I would say that COP declarations are more binding. That doesn’t mean that they haven’t failed in the past. But since the Paris agreement, we’ve seen at least the architecture that has been created for monitoring at the national at the global level. That’s the reason why you have the global stock takes as well that have a five year cycle that will look at the progress that countries are making against their nationally determined contributions, and what is the gap that exists between, you know, all the sum of all parts versus what we need to limit the temperature goals, and how do you sort of then increase ambitions across the board to try and mitigate the gaps? And like I’d said earlier, these commitments are not just at the global level, and they don’t just remain as vacuous commitment vacuous statements. Because these are nationally determined commitments, countries need to show how they’re sort of working on it. And, hence, they get then I they become part of policy discourse. So in the EU context, the Fit for fifty ‘5 or some, their way of also translating their international commitments into what it means at the EU level, which then will have to be boiled down to each EU member country’s targets, so that it’s sort of the sum of parts is equals to the whole. In the Indian context as well, I would say that our first NDCs have said that we will, you know, look at having non fossil fuel capacity of about 40% by by 2030. And, at that time, there was sort of mixed views on the direction of travel, whether it’ll be easy to achieve it, not easy to achieve it, etc. But we also had, domestically, just before that, huge announcement of, like, you know, increasing our renewables target from 10 gigawatts to 175 gigawatts by 2022. And that was just a massive growth. And I feel that in the absence of this global move towards clean energy, nationals governments making those commitments there, which then boil down into policies, we would not see the increase in, efforts around clean energy, around sustainability measures at the rate and pace that we’ve seen at the moment. And now it’s become a part of everything. Right? You have had now financial systems, businesses that have to also report against their emissions, etcetera. So, it may feel a lot of times that international conversations are just talk, and it is a long, painful, slow process, but they do end up materializing in our daily context. Why else do we talk about net zero if not for the commitment or at least the announcement that was made at COP twenty, ‘6 in 2021 by, prime minister Modi? Net zero by 2017 in the Indian context. Yeah. Generally. Thanks.

Shreya Jai: Got it. Yes. So in in the same breath, if you can talk about some of the strategies, that, you know, are put into force for climate and energy diplomacy? And you’ve mentioned it, and we have been going around and around that it’s a multipolar word. There are different agendas. So, you know, some of the strategies that that function.

Madhura Joshi: I think strategies are maybe, I won’t say that these are I won’t call what I’m going to present as strategies, but approaches that are possible. And I think that in the current context, it’s one of the things that we’ve seen, especially post COVID, is that, you have now cascading impacts of multiple crises and multiple priorities. Right? Hence, the solutions that we are now or rather negotiating spaces are finding cannot separate a financial debt burden with from, like, a development challenge from a climate mitigation imperative, to a clean energy transition imperative. A lot of these are now sort of policing with each other. Second is that domestic politics all across is becoming more and more contentious. There are, again, these multiple priorities that are playing out at global level are also more urgent and acute at the at the national at the local level. And people are facing climate impacts on almost a daily basis. You know, whether you believe whether it’s sort of extreme heat temperatures, unseasonal rains, floods, forest fires, pollutions, etcetera. So we need now increasingly, first, solutions that can help in addressing different multiple priorities simultaneously. Second, we also need I mean, at the end of the day, these are political actors with a political time frame of generally five years, ten years maybe that are looking to solve a generational long term problem and goal. So you need, multilateralism as well to deliver on short term goals while keep while ensuring that the long term sort of, long term goal while, like, countries are on path towards long term goal. And that is something that is tricky because now we’ve gone beyond just announcements and policies to actually getting to the hard task of implementing them and implementing them at a faster pace because the climate chain is changing at a much faster pace than the you know, what we thought about, five years, ten years, or definitely in the nineteen nineties when UNFCCC was formed. Right? They kept the problem for this generation to solve, and we if we don’t address it now, it’s going to become a huge problem later on. So I would say solutions are addressed with multiple problems. Multilateralism, you know, delivering goals in the short term as well as with short term benefits while working towards long term goals. The third thing I would say is that, like, I think an interesting part of the multipolarity has also been, yes, it’s made negotiations have always been difficult. It’s becoming all the more tricky because of multiple actors and priorities, But it’s also leading to new forms of partnerships being, sort of emerging. Right? You don’t necessarily have now, you know, the older dominant blocks coming up in, you can’t say that you like, in Baku, if yours, to give you an example, US and China perhaps were a little bit quieter and on the back foot. You had other countries, smaller countries, playing a more active role. But I think a multipolarity also will mean that countries will now have to play an active role in agenda setting. You can’t wait for someone else to set the agenda and have a more defensive part, and there will be opportunities for new alliances to form. Now European Union and China as a result of, I think I mean, on the sidelines of Baku came out to talk about, you know, how they will work together on climate commitments, cooperation. China willing to move away a little bit from their past positions. And this will also need, like, creative diplomacy to build relations outside the negotiating rooms. It’s not just about cops now. It’s about throughout the year, through your multiple economic bilateral relations as well. It also means expanding perhaps this the the net of actors and stakeholders that have been involved, and that’s actually been useful also in moving conversations around and sometimes in sort of blocking conversations. And lastly, I would say is that I think there’s a need very much to strengthen capacities of countries to engage as negotiators, especially for the developing world because our sort of, I I will our our expertise is strong, but our financial wherewithal and capacities on the ground can be quite limited compared to how prepared sometimes you have or how the large contingents that you have from the developed world. Second is also multiplicities of actors and building capacities also means that civil society actors and voices need to be stronger and have that ability to hold people to account, whether it’s within their country or out, you know, international actors. And we’ve seen youth voices and all also play a quite a big role in actually getting act leaders to move by naming and shaming on the outskirts of, like, you know, climate diplomacy. So it is definitely a complex world. It is the hard job of, like, actually, you know, implementing things at a pace that’s been much faster than what we’ve seen in the past. But, yeah, there’s no alternative but to try and find these creative solutions.

Sandeep Pai: Yeah. I have one follow-up, which, you know, have even just being in this space and just not like you, but observing from outside, kind of I’ve what I find is, like, it’s more difficult for people of color, from developing countries, to to have any say, or, like, you have to push the boundaries even more. I don’t know if you’ll agree to this, but if you do, are there examples where this has been very successful where this is not dominant by G7? You know, this is really like something that the global South and the leaders within global South political leadership, but also I’m talking about civil society and others who have kind of moved the needle in some of these.

Madhura Joshi: I do think that, you know, you’ve had countries, global South countries, play a huge role in moving the needle. Like, just the UNFCCC was in the Rio Summit, Rio Earth Summit. Right? That was the genesis of it. Our whole sustainable development goals have also come from global south country summits, etcetera. But you’re very right that it’s this is where the whole capacities question also comes in, and I think that links to the multipolarity of it. There’s multipolarity in power and voice, but that needs to also be demonstrated then in the ability and willingness to try and set the agenda. So we are not on the back foot always. And I feel that change in the negotiating rooms is happening, but needs to happen in a bigger scale on setting agenda that helps us in addressing the climate change solutions. But, again, coming back to it, coming back to your question, we’ve there have been spaces, coalitions that have come where you’ve had, I can’t remember which country it was. It was a small, I think it was a small island state that told The US when it was flip flopping on the tutor protocol saying either get out of the way or join the process. And that sort of, you know, also created the pressure on them to work on it. We in last year’s negotiations also behind the scenes, we’d heard that Colombia was really actually active in trying to be the bridge builder and the connector between different countries to get them together to agree on it. In the Paris agreement also, you had countries all like, you had different sort of groupings of countries working together. India has also played, like, you know, role in building those bridges behind the scenes to make it happen. But the representation remains limited, and I would say that part of that reason is that there are actual resource challenges in terms of how much money is available for global South organizations. Second is access challenges. A lot of us, I think I mean, I till the time I started actually working a lot more on the COP processes in the current role, I was not sure how these, you know, badges got allotted, who gets the quota of being able to go to a COP and not go to a COP, etcetera. And you see that now changing. Brazil this year wants to prioritize global South participation in civil society, wants to give them a higher number of badges. Because I think for a lot of the think tanks in civil societies in this space, we’ve been so focused on the domestic that the international is not something that we have looked at as much. We have in the limited capacities, but that has led to lesser presence in those spaces.But that hopefully will increase with more capacities being built at a time when financing is also getting tight. But, but this is a challenge, and it is something that is recognized that you have it’s The agenda has often been driven, by the global North, and now there is a concerted effort to see what global South voices can look like. And that’s why the emerging spaces around BRICS, around, how the G20 presidencies also are forming their vision of energy and climate is very interesting.

Shreya Jai: So, you know, once you, say, get a big partnership or you, some big announcement happens at some of them that you listed, how do you and others work with country level partners and other stakeholders to ensure that these commitments are followed through? And if you can explain this via some examples.

Madhura Joshi: So I think, let me take the example of tripling re doubling energy efficiency. I think to get to get that into first the commitment itself, there was a whole bunch of work that happens before. Right? I don’t think I mean, a lot of what we see in negotiating text has been a result of multiple voices, multiple actors, multiple think tanks, scientists, etcetera, working behind the scenes to create that body of work and spell up momentum so that it finally gets into that one sentence into the text. But on the case of tripling re doubling energy efficiency, before this, you know, sort of conversation was happening, you had, in 2021, coal phase out discussion happened. Right? And you had coal phase down coming into the COP text. But you could quickly realize that phase down is difficult without clean energy coming online simultaneously. Right? How do you phase down something if you don’t have enough to supply energy, electricity, etcetera, to your households? So it then got into the more granular part of how do you put a number towards, like, a target that globally countries can look at sort of working on. You had multilateral agencies doing sort of the modeling exercises to try and look at what the global numbers can look like for that. There have been a lot of think tanks, including us also looking at what the trajectory of, pipelines on fossil fuels, on thermal power, etcetera, look like, how they’ve increased or reduced over a period of time from commitments that have been made, and what is the growth of renewables? So you created that body of work through multilateral agencies, civil society actors, business voices saying that, yes, this is possible, and we need to see sort of renewables as the future direction. Countries that were championing championing it. So, I mean, India has a clean energy future. It was playing a really active role in looking at and pushing for ambition on tripling RE under its presidency. You also had EU stepping up for it, to talk about it. So you go ahead and get that into the text. Now the next stage is essentially looking through, again, monitoring mechanisms. So IEA has now set up a platform, a sort of a platform, a dashboard for the lack of a better word right now, to see how countries are progressing against the commitments that were made in Dubai declaration around tripling RE, doubling energy efficiency, phasing down from fossil fuels. So those reports at a global level really help. Then at the national level, you see, are your national targets ambitious enough? Where is the room for it to grow? What are the bottlenecks that are preventing perhaps this from moving? Understanding the nuances of that sector better at the national level, at the state level. How do you make, How do you perhaps grow renewables? And then talking to financiers, talking to actors to look at what are the possible solutions that can help, if finance is a blocker, to attract more finance. So I think there are ways in which this can sort of be puzzled in a lot of different ways, but there’s a whole bunch of research that goes into it, a whole bunch of conversation with experts, on understanding what are the different solutions that can be possible, talking to policy makers on seeing which of these solutions can actually be implemented as well, for that for for progress to happen. And then, of course, there is the whole piece about monitoring as well, right, at the global level to show where the laggards are, who the laggards are, who the sort of leaders are, what the challenges are. And similarly at the national level, to understand why certain targets may not have been met and how do you sort of increase the pace of action if needed?

Sandeep Pai: Right. I wanna ask one one question about the I mean, you touched upon this throughout the last forty minutes we talked about. But I wanna understand, what are the different tools that actually civil society has, to to, you know, influence change? So, for example, what I mean by tools is, like, research is a tool. So what is the gambit of all the tools available from campaigns to research? And, are they but the crux of my question is, are they are some tools more effective in certain type of countries and other tools more effective in other type of countries? I know I’m throwing you for example, is it that certain countries are more responsive to good research and other countries care less about research or or I’m just

Madhura Joshi: I think that may be a bit too perhaps I wouldn’t say that, you know, one works more than others. I think the the level of intensity may vary a little bit, but, I would say that maybe different actors respond to different kinds of messaging and different kinds of solutions. I think research is really important, but how you communicate that research is equally important. Right? And I completely sympathize with policymakers who are dealing with multiple different issues. You give them a 120 page report that will be very well researched and nuanced and referenced. But if you can’t tell them what the key takeaways are and where they can dig in for specific details should they want, it’s going to be highly difficult for a policymaker to look at 100 such researchers, which are 100 pages long. So the format of communication, the way of distilling the message is really important. Similarly, with diplomats, you know, a diplomat in a country is dealing with energy, is dealing with climate, is dealing with trade, is dealing with your visa issues, is dealing with immigration. They’re, you know, they have to be experts of everything. So they don’t have the time. They won’t have sectoral expertise to the extent that, you know, you and I may have because we work so much in this space. But they are experts in being able to, you know, navigate the political tensions, which we may not understand have a full understanding of. So how do you communicate to them? So research, I think, is really important, but communication is equally important. And being the ability to talk to different age groups of audience, different types of audience to distill that research and make it useful and worthwhile, that is really helpful, and that is a huge skill. The third, I would say, is also the ability to get different types of actors together and bringing their voices and concerns, because, I mean, we can say that there is there is, the what is it? Ivory tower work happening at different levels. Right? We we tell the the at the international level, you don’t understand the national context. Very true. At the national level, we say you don’t understand the subnational context, which is also very true. And then at the subnational state level, I will say that you don’t you know, you’re an urban I’m an urban person. I don’t necessarily have the deep understanding of what a rural challenge is. And then those sort of will differ by gender, by cast, by class. So understand those nuances are really important to under to be able to get to a good policy and, hence, the ability to get different kinds of actors together. And, you know, being able to reflect and identify their challenges and reflect their challenges in the work that we do is really important. And I would say that, what is a campaign? A campaign is when it’s sort of trying to build everything, all of these different aspects together using a mix of research, using a mix of multimedia comms, using a mix of different voices to communicate a message more convincingly. And in some cases, especially, we have seen this in The US, legal systems have also been used very extensively to implement laws to prevent companies from or gov or, you know, even sort of, bodies from violating environmental laws, from building stronger laws, like in the context of South Africa more recently where you had the, you know, legal system, controlling that said that building new now thermal power plants may be against the climate law itself that they’ve put in place. So these are just some of the tools that are there. But even within research, it’s just so biased and varied. You can do the heart sciences. You can do the modeling work. You can do finance. You can look at it from a psychological perspective and behavioral change, governance. So, yeah, these are some of the varied ways in which you can look at addressing the problem.

Shreya Jai: Thank you. That gives an opening to my next and, last question unless Sandeep has a follow-up. You gave us a lot of career pathways there. I’m also enticed to, explore that. But what is an advice that you would give, say, students or professionals who want to, you know, enter into the climate energy diplomacy space, especially in today’s era?

Madhura Joshi: So I would say that diplomacy is just one part of it. And I didn’t I mean, I may have start wanted to work on diplomacy, but didn’t start off with that. It just took a longer way. So I feel that if you’re interested in the climate and energy space, wherever you are, get stuck in it. And there are now so many ways of looking at it. It can be from a built environment, from a fashion perspective, from engine I mean, engineering, of course, quite obviously. But even, like, anthropologists are looking at how relationship of energy and individuals. So there are I think every aspect of your life now can does have an energy climate space, and there is more awareness and opportunities available as well. I think diplomacy for me has become more interesting and robust because I could manage to build my knowledge base from the domestic sectors now to be able to look at the in international space. But diplomacy is also happening or international conversations are happening in all of these different sectors. Like fashion itself, there is so much of work that’s happening around what does sustainable fashion look like, how do you prevent greenwashing, what does a circular economy look like, setting standards for companies and industries. So I feel that, if you’re interested in the space, find whichever first route that you get to be able to get more work experience to build your knowledge and, you know, get an understanding across different levels, the local, the the the rural, the urban, the local, state, national, and then sort of work your way up to diplomacy, or you do it the other way around as well. But, the roots now are varied, and I think easier not easier, but, yeah, roots now are varied for you to choose from.

Sandeep Pai:Thank you so much, Madhurra. This has been a really great conversation. I always learn a lot from you, so thank you.

Shreya Jai: Yeah. Thank you so much, Madhurra. Thanks a lot.

Madhura Joshi: Thank you so much, Sandeep. You’re, very kind. I hope my ramblings were of interest and will be of interest to your listeners. Thank you so much for having me on the show. 

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