Don't Celebrate the Reference, Build the System.
Why text wins feel empty and what 6 years of negotiations taught me about converting text into power.
What’s good team?
How’s your Saturday morning going?
Here’s a picture you all have seen more than once.
Two weeks of negotiations. Corridors. Late nights. Caucus meetings at 8 AM. Fighting for two words.
“Indigenous Peoples.”
That’s it. Two words. You push, pull. You lobby. You try to find allies. You watch brackets open and close. You hold your breath during informals you’re not invited to.
Final session. The gavel drops. The two words survived.
You go home. You post celebratory photos on Facebook. You get praise on LinkedIn. “Historic win.” “Years of advocacy paid off.” “Our voices were heard.”
Six months later, after the honeymoon.
You feel like you’ve just rearranged the deck chairs on the Titanic.
Time goes by and before you know it, you’re preparing for the same meeting. Same process. Same rooms. Same fight, different year, different text.
And then you get that feeling you’ve only kicked the can further down the road.
The Problem
Here are some things you may have said to yourself already:
Why does this feel empty? We won. We got the words. So why do I feel like I’m running in circles?
I’m exhausted. Two weeks of fighting for just two words. And now I have to do it again next year? For something else?
Maybe I’m just not cut out for this. Everyone else seems to know what they’re doing. They celebrate. They move on. I can’t shake the feeling we’re missing something.
I keep telling my community we’re making progress. But when they ask what changed on the ground? I don’t have a good answer.
What if I’m wasting years of my life on wins that don’t do anything for my community?
I get it. These thoughts are real. I had them for years.
Here’s what you’re missing.
A reference to Indigenous Peoples without a system around it is just decoration.
You fight to get your name on the door. You celebrate. Then you walk through and discover there’s no room behind it.
The text says you matter. The architecture says you’re optional.
That’s not a win. That’s a participation trophy.
What I Noticed
The Clean Development Mechanism taught us this the hard way.
No references. Indigenous Peoples affected. The activity cycle, the validation requirements, the operational details where protection actually lives or dies?
Nothing. No words, no rights. No vocabulary. No mechanism. No system.
So when the Paris Agreement’s infamous Article 6 came around, we knew exactly what we were looking at.
Another carbon mechanism.
Another form of colonization.
Another CDM 2.0 waiting to happen.
Unless we fought differently.
So, what did we do?
We negotiated Article 6 intensely for six, seven years.
Not for references. For a system. For ARCHITECTURE.
Human rights language not just in a preamble. Embedded in operational requirements. Eventually we got it into the preamble (which was a huge win).
Indigenous Peoples participation in activity design. Not consultation after the fact. Participation where decisions get made.
A grievance mechanism. Something that actually triggers when things go wrong.
These are things in Article 6 that weren’t in CDM.
We didn’t pop champagne when words landed in Glasgow, Sharm, Dubai or Baku. We kept pushing throughout the years until those words had somewhere to go. Enabling environment. Mechanism. Consequence.
You can win the paragraph and lose the architecture.
Or you can fight for both.
You know what we did?
We fought for both.
The Pattern Recognized
Watch what President Trump is doing right now. Drill, baby, drill. More oil. More production. Sounds like power.
But here’s the thing. Oil in the ground is just a resource. It doesn’t become power until you can move it, refine it, insure it, sell it, and get paid.
That conversion runs through chokepoints. Pipelines. Shipping lanes. Insurance markets. Settlement systems. The dollar.
Control the resource? You have potential.
Control the conversion chain? You have POWER.
Same logic applies here. System = Power.
A reference is the resource. But if you don’t design into the architecture the enabling environment, the mechanism, the consequence, or if you don’t see the system? Then you have just vocabulary, not protection.
What Happens If You Miss It
A system won’t always reveal itself in one UN meeting. Article 6 took us many years. And we’re still in system-building mode. Still refining. Still pushing.
In some processes States kick the can down the road. You wanted a result today. But because States get to decide, you have to wait another year.
Now, you can complain about it. Many do. Loudly. On panels. In side events. In frustrated WhatsApp messages during closing plenary.
Or you can use it to your advantage.
Didn’t like a decision from a few years ago? I could be bitter about it. Or, I could design a sequence that makes it obsolete. Find the opening where better language can be inserted. Build the micro-coalition that can carry it. Build a strategy where the old decision becomes inconvenient for enough States.
Then move.
Paragraph 31(e) of the Glasgow decision on Article 6.4 is still like a pebble in my shoe.
But I don’t mope about it.
Those who complain are stuck in single-session thinking.
The Indigenous leaders who win are playing across sessions.
Miss this, and you’ll spend years at the UN chasing two words while the system gets built to undermine Indigenous rights.
Your Next Move
Stop counting references. Start tracing architecture.
Every time language lands in a text, ask one question: What is the system we’re creating?
And if this session didn’t give you what you needed? Don’t wait and complain.
Take all the learnings from this session. What worked. What didn’t. Who moved. Who blocked. What language landed. What language got stripped. Update the strategy. Design the system.
Before You Go
Here are some limiting beliefs you should watch out for:
“If we’re in the text, we’re protected.”
Words without conversion? A weak text that mentions us is still a weak text.“Getting the reference is the hard part.”
It’s not. Article 6 took six, seven years. The architecture fight is the real fight.“We can use the language later.”
No. “Later” never comes unless the architecture forces it.“We lost this session, so we lost.”
Wrong frame. Systems don’t resolve in one session. Play across sessions, not within them.
The reference to Indigenous Peoples is just the resource.
The architecture is where protection lives or dies.
Many focus on sessions.
Real leaders focus on systems.
So should you.
See you next week!