The Biggest Threat to Your Position Isn't Someone Arguing Against You.
On how 1992 agreed language gets copy-pasted into 2026 docs.
Good morning,
As I’ve been preparing for BBNJ PrepCom 3 (starts on Monday) I thought I’d share that your biggest threat to your negotiating position might be your own language.
Not their words. Yours. The phrases you keep reaching for because someone agreed to them before you ever walked into the room. They feel safe. They feel official. They feel settled. That’s exactly why they’re dangerous.
You've done this. You know you have. You grabbed a term from a past submission, a position paper, a community strategy document, and dropped it into the new version because it passed before. It'll pass again. Why rewrite something that already works?
Because “works” has an expiration date.
That company slogan on the wall that stopped being true three directors ago? Still there. The job title that doesn’t match what anyone does? Still in the org chart. The policy language drafted for a problem that evolved while the wording stayed frozen? Still in the contract.
Nobody updates it. You know why?
Because updating means admitting it’s wrong. And admitting it’s wrong means someone has to do the work of getting a new version agreed. So everyone keeps copy-pasting. Year after year after year.
At the United Nations, this has a name. Agreed language. When 193 countries sign off on a phrase, that phrase carries weight. It’s supposed to.
But, I call the outdated version legacy language. Agreed language that aged out of accuracy but never aged out of use. The phrase is still in the document. The world it described is not.
You don’t need to work at the UN to recognize this. You don’t need a law degree. You don’t need to know what BBNJ stands for. You just need to have inherited someone else’s words and never questioned them. (Most of us have. I did for years. That’s the whole point.)
Monday I sit down for BBNJ PrepCom 3. The treaty process for the high seas. Adopted in 2023. And the text still carries phrases that should have been pulled apart years ago. Two examples from rooms I’ve been in this month.
First: “Indigenous Peoples and local communities.”
You see this phrase everywhere. Environmental negotiations. Biodiversity frameworks. Climate texts. One phrase. One unit. As if these are the same thing.
They’re not.
Indigenous Peoples are distinct rights holders under international law. Not just rights holders (everyone is a rights holder, you have individual rights by being human). Indigenous Peoples carry something specific on top of that. Collective rights. Self-determination. A full declaration backing it up.
Local communities? Nobody has even agreed on a definition.
Different legal standing. Different history. Different claims. Smash them together and the stronger rights holder gets diluted by association. Not because someone in the room decided to undermine Indigenous rights. Because someone in a different room, years ago, chose a convenient shorthand. And everyone after them copy-pasted it.
Copy-pasted it without thinking. Sound familiar?
That’s the pattern. It doesn’t attack. It erodes. Slowly. Quietly. Through repetition. Every time a negotiator reaches for that combined phrase because it’s what the last resolution said, the distinction gets buried a little deeper. The phrase becomes the default. The default becomes the ceiling. And nobody notices because the ceiling looks like it was always there.
I’ve raised this in climate texts, in environmental governance rooms, in health frameworks. The pushback is always the same. “But the agreed language says...”
Yes. That’s the problem. The agreed language says it. The law doesn’t support it. But the phrase is in the document, so it keeps getting used. And used. And used.
Makes sense? Good. Now apply it to your own situation.
When a term caps what you can ask for before the conversation even starts, you’re not negotiating. You’re performing inside someone else’s constraints. And you might not even know it, because the constraint doesn’t look like a constraint. It looks like infrastructure. It looks like “the way we’ve always done it.”
Btw, “the way we’ve always done it.” Famous words I actually hate.
First time I flagged this in a drafting session, the reaction wasn’t disagreement. It was confusion. Like pointing out a crack in a wall everyone walked past every day. That’s what makes legacy language so dangerous. Familiarity feels like accuracy.
The fix is boring. Name Indigenous Peoples as a standalone. Reference local communities separately. Two phrases. Two lines. But boring fixes are the hardest to push through because nobody wants to reopen text that already passed.
That reluctance? That’s exactly what legacy language feeds on.
Second: “traditional knowledge.”
This one is harder to talk about. Why? Because Indigenous Peoples helped write it into international law. The Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples uses it. At the time, getting “traditional knowledge” into the text was a win. Real doors opened. Doors that had been locked for decades.
So why would anyone want to change language that we fought for? Why question the words that got us in the room?
Because language that opened a door in 2007 can become the lock in 2026.
“Traditional” implies something from the past. A relic. Something your grandmother knew that modern science replaced. I watch delegates use this framing to file Indigenous knowledge under heritage instead of science, culture instead of policy. The word gives them permission. Every single time it appears in a document, it tells the room this knowledge belongs in the past tense.
It doesn’t. Indigenous knowledge systems are living. Practiced today. Evolving. Responding to current conditions in real time. Nothing “traditional” about a system that’s been adapting for thousands of years and keeps producing insights that Western science is only now catching up to. (And yes, I know saying that makes some people uncomfortable. Good.)
The better term?
Knowledge of Indigenous Peoples.
Center the rights holder. Remove the timestamp. Done.
Now the part that took me the longest to see.
When you pull “Indigenous Peoples and local communities” apart, a question comes up. What happens to “traditional knowledge” for local communities?
Now I would say: Keep it.
Because “Traditional knowledge” works fine for local communities. It describes a type of knowledge.
For Indigenous Peoples, it’s different. The knowledge isn’t a type. It’s a system. It doesn’t need a qualifier any more than Western science needs to be called “traditional Western empirical knowledge.” It’s just knowledge. Held by a distinct rights holder.
“Traditional” doesn’t describe Indigenous knowledge. It shrinks it. For local communities? It’s a descriptor. For Indigenous Peoples? It’s a cage. And separating the categories without fixing the label is half a solution. You pulled the names apart but left the word that keeps one of them stuck in the past.
Here’s why this matters for you. Right now. This week.
Legacy language draws the boundaries of what you’re allowed to ask for before the conversation even starts. You don’t need to work at the UN to see this. You just need to have inherited someone else’s words.
Here’s why this matters for you. Right now. This week.
Legacy language draws the boundaries of what you’re allowed to ask for before the conversation even starts. And this doesn’t just happen in Geneva.
You’re the community leader drafting a submission to a UN consultation process. The template uses terms like “stakeholder” and “consultation” because that’s what the last submission said. But “stakeholder” flattens your standing. You’re not a stakeholder. You’re a distinct rights holder. And “consultation” implies they’re asking for your input. They should be seeking your consent. But the template said “stakeholder consultation,” so that’s what gets submitted. Again.
Sound familiar?
Or you’re writing a grant proposal and the funder’s guidelines use “capacity building.” So you use it too. But “capacity building” implies you lack capacity. It frames the funding as filling a gap in you, not resourcing the work you’re already doing. The funder’s language shaped what you asked for before you even started writing. (Nobody will tell you this. That’s the thing about legacy language. It doesn’t come with a warning label.)
Or maybe you’re an Indigenous organization still using “our traditional practices” in your own advocacy materials because that’s how the movement described itself twenty years ago. The community evolved. The governance systems evolved. The strategy evolved. But the words? Same words. Same frame. Same ceiling.
That’s legacy language doing its work. Through repetition. Through the reluctance to reopen what already passed. Through the assumption that official means accurate.
It doesn’t. Official means states agreed to it once. That’s it.
So here’s a question to sit with this week.
What’s one term in your work that everyone uses but nobody has defined in years? What was it supposed to mean? What does it actually mean now?
And if you updated it, what would you suddenly be allowed to ask for that you couldn’t before? You’re allowed to change the words. Even the ones that feel permanent.
Especially those.
See you next week!
P.S.: I share daily briefs for monthly members. Here is what last week covered:
Tactical empathy. Not sympathy. I explained the DNA of member states and why some countries will never accept collective rights. It is not about convincing them. It is about stopping yourself from wasting time trying.
A Japanese group held a side event at the Human Rights Council to delegitimize the Ryukyu peoples of Okinawa. A panel of non-Indigenous people claiming Indigenous Peoples are not Indigenous. I have seen this playbook before.
I explained the difference between a champion and an ambassador. Most delegations we put on a pedestal are ambassadors. That matters for your entire strategy.
The 80% biodiversity statistic got debunked. The one 476 million Indigenous Peoples have been running on. Whoever published it did not provide a replacement narrative. I broke down why that is not academic housekeeping. It is strategic damage
I walked through the country profiles I build before every negotiation. Not academic research. Strategic profiles that tell me what the aspirin is for each delegation’s headache
Pattern recognition, pattern creation, and pattern disruption. I unpacked the three skills that matter most in multilateral spaces
The UN80 informal shifted from debating mechanics to a brawl over who holds the power to eliminate mandates. WEOG is pushing hard. I tracked both sessions and broke down what changed.
Conservation papers keep landing in my inbox. I explained why most are unusable in a negotiation room.