Power and Participation in the First Global Stocktake: Rethinking Inclusivity in Climate Governance

The Global Stocktake (GST) is the Paris Agreement’s primary participatory mechanism for assessing collective climate progress, formally designed to operate “in the light of equity” and to broaden engagement beyond state actors. While GST-1 was widely portrayed as inclusive, its participatory practices reflect broader tensions observed in contemporary governance: expanding participatory spaces on the one hand, and persistent structural and epistemic exclusions on the other. This paper analyses GST-1 through a power-sensitive framework that conceptualises participation across visible, hidden, and invisible dimensions, contributing to wider debates on the democratic quality and consequences of participatory governance beyond electoral politics. Drawing on participant observation across GST phases, 26 semi-structured interviews, and document analysis of Party and non-Party stakeholder submissions, the study examines how inclusivity was discursively constructed and how structural conditions shaped the ability of different actors—particularly from the Majority world—to exercise influence. Findings show that although the Technical Dialogue broadened access through world cafés, roundtables, and multi-actor inputs, longstanding asymmetries persisted. Visa barriers, funding constraints, delegation capacity, and linguistic hierarchies limited meaningful engagement, while technocratic and scientific expertise dominated deliberation, constraining the recognition of Indigenous, local, and experiential forms of knowledge. In the political phase, agenda-setting power and informal bargaining further reduced influence for low-power stakeholders. By situating these dynamics within broader scholarship on participatory, deliberative, and technocratic modes of engagement, the paper argues that procedural equity cannot be equated with access alone. Meaningful participation requires confronting underlying power relations that determine whose voices shape collective decisions. The paper concludes with implications for designing participatory institutions capable of producing more equitable governance outcomes—within global climate politics and beyond.