Clean and Green: The Politics of Spectacle at Dubai’s COP28

• In Event: Authoritarianism and Contentious Politics in the Middle East

Abstract

In December 2023, the United Arab Emirates hosted the 28th Conference of the Parties (COP28) to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). Over the two weeks of the climate summit, a record 85,000 people from around the globe arrived at the Dubai Expo2020 meeting site to negotiate treaty text, attend high level sessions, participate in hundreds of side events, advocate on behalf of civil society, lobby for business interests, and develop transnational networks. Competing headlines critiqued the hypocrisy of an authoritarian oil state hosting a climate summit while others lauded the resulting treaty text – the first that explicitly names fossil fuels – as a landmark success. Have the UNFCCC COP meetings become merely superficial spectacle? Or do they remain meaningful sites of politics? Based on ethnographic data gathered at and around COP28 – including participant observation during the duration of the COP, discourse analysis of state and international media, and original interviews with organizers and attendees – this paper proposes that sites of global environmental governance like COP28 are indeed spectacular, but that spectacle reflects and captures social relations (Debord 1967). I argue that attention to the spectacle of COP illuminates three distinct phenomena: 1) regime’s use of greenwashing to legitimate authoritarian rule as an upstanding member of the international liberal order; 2) organizers materially and discursively sanitizing environmental issues like waste that are potentially politically contentious; and 3) despite restrictions, the opportunity for limited but meaningful contestation and solidarity building among environmental actors who would otherwise be unable to connect.

Author

• Lauren Marie Baker, Northwestern University