Crafting African Climate Diplomacy: The Politics of Consensus-Building Through Common African Positions

Regional groups stand much to gain from coordinated diplomacy, yet actual unity is hard to come by. In Africa’s international politics, frail national sovereignty creates particularly strong disincentives for continental diplomatic empowerment. Yet across different policy areas and multilateral settings, African states increasingly coordinate positions in processes we know very little about. This article asks: Why and how do African states agree on Common African Positions (CAPs) at the continental level? While existing literature often brackets or simply questions Africa’s diplomatic cohesion, this study highlights the epistemic and diplomatic practices leading to unified positions. The paper develops four mechanisms enabling CAP negotiation and implementation: ascertaining international opportunity structure, deploying institutional capacity, mobilizing legitimate knowledge, and consensus-building through precedent. By enabling diplomatic practice through these four mechanisms, CAPs function as vehicles for African agency, producing continental processes that bridge logics of appropriateness and consequences for member states’ buy-in. The paper also shows that competing definitions of success significantly mark the diplomatic consensus-building processes to a point of driving misalignment and preventing consensus on outcome documents. Three case studies of the CAP on Climate, Peace, and Security, Africa’s position at COP29, and the Nairobi Declaration on Climate Change offer new empirical insights in African climate diplomacy. By theorizing CAP processes, the article contributes to debates on African multilateralism and broader regional strategies for influencing international negotiations in climate, security, and development.