Negotiating Co-Constitutive Crises: Racism and the Climate Crisis as Experienced by Black, Indigenous, and PoC Climate Negotiators and Experts

Research on global climate governance has extensively documented structural inequalities between countries of the Global North and South, yet racism within climate negotiations remains largely unexamined. This omission is particularly striking at a time when international climate governance faces growing legitimacy crises, geopolitical fragmentation, and mounting pressure to advance a just transition. This paper addresses this gap by analysing how Black, Indigenous, and People of Colour (BIPoC) climate negotiators and experts experience, interpret, and contest racialised power relations within UNFCCC negotiations. Drawing on climate justice scholarship, the paper conceptualises racism and the climate crisis as co-constitutive crises. We argue that racialised hierarchies are enacted through institutional practices, epistemic hierarchies, and discursive norms within negotiation spaces, shaping both negotiators’ experiences and negotiation outcomes. To capture these dynamics, the paper develops a multi-level analytical framework that distinguishes between the interpersonal, institutional, and structural dimensions of racism, with particular attention to counter-strategies of resistance. Empirically, the article draws on semi-structured expert interviews, a focus group discussion, and longitudinal follow-up interviews conducted three years after the initial interview round to capture changing negotiation dynamics following African-led COP presidencies. This multi-level heuristic allows the paper to trace how structural racial hierarchies are mediated through institutional arrangements—such as agenda-setting, delegation size, technocratic discourse norms, and informal networks—and become experientially salient in interpersonal interactions. The findings show that racism is identified across all analytical levels, operating through mechanisms such as epistemic gatekeeping, strategic overwhelm, and the systematic devaluation of moral and affective claims. At the same time, negotiators deploy a range of counter-strategies to navigate and contest these conditions, including practices of solidarity and collective strategising, alliance-building with civil society actors, and forms of epistemic contestation. By centring the experiential knowledge of those negotiating under conditions of racialised asymmetry, the paper advances debates in environmental politics on global climate governance, just transitions, and racialised hierarchies. It demonstrates that understanding climate governance requires attention to racism not merely as a structural backdrop, but as an active force shaping political outcomes and possibilities for a just transition.