I had the message. They gave me the words.

On designing a presentation out of the words a room was already fighting over.

Tabea, happy Saturday,

I flew to Nairobi for SBSTTA, where the Convention on Biological Diversity does its science homework before the political meetings decide anything. I was there for the marine and coastal biodiversity negotiations, and for a side event where I had a speaking slot.

The day before it I sat in the contact group with no speaking role. Nothing to deliver, nothing to defend. Just a notebook and a seat at the back.

I already knew what I wanted to say. I did not know how to say it so it would land in that room.

Two acronyms you will need

The side event was hosted by the CBD Secretariat with DOALOS, the Division for Ocean Affairs and the Law of the Sea. Think of it as the United Nations legal desk for the ocean. It ran the negotiations that produced the BBNJ Agreement, covering marine biodiversity beyond national borders.

The other is the KMGBF, the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework, the global plan for nature agreed under the CBD. Targets to 2030, the best known being the promise to protect 30 percent of land and sea. Roughly what Paris is for climate, without the treaty status.

So the room held the ocean law people and the biodiversity people, working out how the two systems fit together.

Most people build this backwards

The usual method is to decide your message, write it, deliver it, and hope the room cares. The packaging comes from your own head, and your own head has never sat in the room you are about to walk into.

My substance was settled long before Nairobi. Anchor BBNJ governance in UNDRIP. Secure participation at all levels. Make Indigenous knowledge co-equal. The open question was which door to walk it through.

I took their word for my spine

So I sat there and wrote down the words people fought over rather than the positions they held. The one that kept surfacing was synergy. The further the meeting went, the more people reached for it, against or approvingly, never examined.

That became my opening.

I could have organised the intervention around my own three directions and made the audience climb into my structure. Instead I started inside theirs. Synergy for the sake of efficiency is not enough, because a downward spiral is also a form of synergy, and the kind we want needs a North Star.

Same three directions underneath, arriving as the answer to a question the room had been asking all day.

Say their objection before they do

Underneath that word sat a discomfort nobody had named, and I share it.

BBNJ holds a higher standard on Indigenous Peoples than the CBD does, with over three dozen references in the Agreement. Put a stronger framework beside a weaker one, call it cooperation, and the stronger tends to come down to meet the weaker.

So I said it out loud, and said I was reluctant too, before making any ask. You earn the right to your ask by first showing you understand what is making the room hesitate.

Be useful on their problem first

The anxiety under that session was not about rights at all.

A new advisory group had been proposed, the Secretariat had to admit COP16 never actually mandated creating one, and one delegation asked whether another body was needed. More bodies, more meetings, overlapping mandates, a budget that is not growing to match.

I could have left it alone.

It is not an Indigenous rights question on its face. Instead I said plainly that the two systems should not build the same machinery twice, and pointed at where the overlap would happen.

Then the turn. However that architecture gets built, it still has to sit on the same North Star, or we end up with better coordinated ways of getting Indigenous participation and knowledge wrong.

Close on their own sentence

During the session FPIC was taken out of the provision on the participation of Indigenous experts, and the reasoning offered was that accepting an invitation to participate already constituted consent.

I wrote that down word for word and stopped taking notes for a minute.

The next day I handed it back.

Accepting an invitation is an individual decision to participate. It is not the free, prior and informed consent of the Indigenous Peoples concerned, and it does not authorise that individual to represent them or share collectively held knowledge on their behalf. Expertise is not the same as collective authority.

That landed harder than anything I could have built in advance, because everyone there had either said it, heard it, or let it pass in silence the day before.

What I did not change

My position was identical to what it would have been if I had written the whole thing on the plane. Same three directions, same order, same insistence that Indigenous Peoples and local communities are two categories and a text that blurs them will blur the rights too.

The opening moved. The spine moved. The closing moved. I spent the middle being useful on somebody else’s problem. The substance sat where it always sits.

Before you go

The roadblock is time.

Almost nobody gets a free day to sit in a room where they have no speaking role, and the sessions you would most want to watch run against the ones you are responsible for.

You do not need the day.

Pick the agenda item closest to your subject, sit through ninety minutes, and leave with four things. The word people keep reaching for, which becomes your opening. The objection nobody has said out loud, which you say for them.

One sentence somebody actually spoke, which becomes your close. And the problem they are stuck on, which is where you make yourself useful before asking for anything.

That fourth one is the one people skip, and the one that buys you the room.

Your argument is probably fine.

The reason it is not landing is usually the packaging, and the packaging is sitting in your audience’s own language waiting for somebody to write it down. Go find out what they are already arguing about, in their words, then say your own thing through their door.

That’s it for today.

See you next week.