Barry: The Leeds Summat Gathering on 26^th November attracted over 1,300 participants and included a myriad of activities. I thought it was a great success and would like to congratulate you. What were the highlights for you as the one of the key organisers?

Ed: I think the process of organising what was a fairly complex and challenging event was, in many ways, full of highlights.

We set out to make the gathering as participatory and contributory as possible, to involve diverse people in its development and delivery. That meant our core partners and others co-delivering it with us.  Seeing how those efforts and resources flowed together was really positive. It meant the event really did embody, with some integrity, what we were seeking.

Within that, we also managed to organise it on a reasonably low budget primarily by blagging and borrowing equipment and resources. We delivered the first Summat for £12,000 or £13,000, and this one we did for £7,500. So we really were learning from our earlier experience which itself is positive. At no point did I feel that we were pushing against closed doors.

Two things about the event itself. First, it met our expectations in terms of our overarching themes, and probably met our best expectations. We wanted it to be a day that was serious and meaty but also fun and socially warm.

Secondly, we aimed to attract up to 1,300 people which we managed. What was interesting in looking through the list of the 800 or so people who pre-registered online, as well as the 500 who came on the day, was that I knew fewer than 10 per cent of them. It was not only the ‘paid-up activists’ who came, who we already know, people I see every week. It was not just my mates who rocked up. It drew in a whole bunch of new people and it’s partly a mystery just who they all were. So it will be interesting to use the feedback to find out more about them.

From the written evaluations and from people telling us about their experiences, people met and encountered other people. They also felt energised. These are summed up in two of the strap lines for the Gathering: ‘Get Connected’ and ‘Be Inspired’.

The third strap line is the interesting one: ‘Join in Action for Change’. We are going to try tracking and evaluating whether this is taking place. Will what was a fun and successful event lead to enduring change? It’s too early to say.

What were the original ideas behind the Summat initiative? How did it come about and in what ways have these ideas developed?

The story of the Summat goes back to the formation of Together For Peace (T4P) in 2003. T4P was created to arrange a 10-day festival of events across Leeds. Initially it was to encourage people to engage in peace and justice issues but this broadened out to looking at the big issues of our time. And it was very much about using creative means also used in later Summats – film, theatre, food, music and drama.

Because T4P has always been a low budget affair, we did not have the capacity to deliver the festival ourselves. So we sought collaboration with about 30 organisations. People enjoyed the festival, although some of it was a bit shambolic behind the schemes. We also held festivals in 2005 and 2007.

The reason we stopped was that people told us, very legitimately, that, while they liked what we were doing, they did not have the time to attend every day. Instead they looked for parts of the programme that already interested them. This meant we weren’t really enabling a general fusion of different people and ideas.

Some fusions did follow: for example, individual refugees began to volunteer for Oxfam which itself began working with the Catholic diocese. The most meaty and meaningful actions were being undertaken through such collaborations and we wanted to find ways to develop this further.

At the same time, from 2006 onwards, we were particularly inspired by the work of north American writer, John Paul Lederach. He has written some great books, including The Moral Imagination: The Art and Soul of Building Social Peace. In it he calls for “web weaving”, enabling diverse people to connect and collaborate in their social spaces, be it a community, a city or a nation. This means making those spaces more resilient, more able to deal creatively with difficult things.

So we stopped doing festivals and condensed them into one-day events. These could then be more about enabling people to connect and collaborate and about integration and action.

Is if fair to say that Together for Peace and the events you organised come from faith-based initiatives, and I don’t mean that pejoratively?

Yes and no. The three original founders of T4P, who were amazing activists, were Christians. But as they handed over the organising, it became increasingly apparent that it was not appropriate to make it overly faith-based because it does not resonate with lots of people. We feel slightly misconstrued as an organisation in this respect but it happens less and less.

That does not mean that we don’t do such work. One member of the team who is Christian has been active for many years in facilitating a Jewish-Muslim dialogue and this is now gathering momentum.

What is it that you are hoping people take with them when they leave, given that the day’s activities begin with breakfast at 9am and continue into the evening with social events?

Our strap line ‘Get Connected, Be Inspired & Join in Action for Change’ encapsulates it. We hope people will take away with them a sense of the need for a better connected yet diverse Leeds, a better connected Yorkshire and a better connected north of England. This amounts to having a healthier place where ideas can flow between different interest groups, across different generations, ethnicities and movements.

For the more engaged activists, we wanted them to feel re-energised by participating, because many go through phases of being tired and fed up, feeling that nobody else seems to be bothering. To be in a space with a whole bunch of other people getting involved really helps.

And finally, while there is nothing wrong with talking shops, projects like Summat do need to hold a mirror up to ourselves. Are we just putting on interesting events or can our activities lead to different forms of action? Sometimes these might be short term, like joining an organisation such as Amnesty International or Greenpeace. But others will hopefully encourage medium or long term change engendered by a stronger community spirit.

As someone else put it, we hope to try to raise the temperature around issues of social change, perhaps even by half a degree, so that progressive social movements become possible.

When you talk about seeking change, what is the change you envisage?

As Lederach argues, you can’t force change, you can only develop the potential for change.

There is very much a resonance, or oneness, between personal change and macro-change or structural change. We want to enable people to make micro changes in their lives all the way to engaging in more significant activities and issues.

If they begin to wrestle with the idea that environmental, social, political and economic issues are inter-connected then that’s progress. We want people to almost intuitively start to grasp that sense of what a huge job is needed; to begin to be able to re-imagine our world. It’s fairly big stuff.

When I hear you speak, I hear echoes of what I would call ethical socialism, and what you do at one level helps to prefigure how you achieve your wider ambitions.

But how would you respond to the kind of criticism that says all this touchy-feely stuff is fine but what about fighting the system, opposing the cuts, tackling the hard issues, and not just sitting round feeling good about ourselves?

That question has to be asked. It’s far too easy for us to construct cosy spaces for ourselves, which we all do to a certain extent.

First, the Summat creates space for groups who want to tackle the big issues. We provide platforms for people to run their own workshops or stalls. This gives them the opportunity to engage with a whole bunch of new people. While Summat is designed to be mainstream and to have a broad appeal, we also want to create space for those wider ideas to be heard.

However, that cannot be the whole response. If that’s all we focus on we are hugely disempowering ourselves. We would be accepting the terms of the struggle defined by pre-established centres of power, by the economic and political system as it is.

Valerie Fournier, who talks a lot about social movements, argues that really crucial steps for developing social change are cultivating outrage. We need to be shining a torch on the centres of power and injustice but this has to be accompanied by creative alternatives.

That’s why the BBC reporter, Justin Rowlett, gave a deliberately provocative talk on the green movement, which he says should be a success but is failing. This, he says, is partly because it is too concerned with being negative (“anti-nuclear, anti-GM, anti-capitalist”) instead of offering creative alternatives. Cultural creativity has to be at the heart of social movements.

What plans do you have for the future?

Over the next few months, I want to research the participants’ responses to the Summat. In particular, it will be interesting to see whether we have encouraged any changes, whether individually or organisationally. If not, it will be useful to consider what the barriers to change are.

In this respect, we were particularly heartened by the comments of two of our leading participants, Maurice Glasman and Peter Tatchell, who were both very positive about the day.

We also have to weigh things up, look at whether the outcomes justify the all-consuming effort of putting on such an event. It will probably take us another six months to decide when and whether to hold it again.

If we go for it, then it will probably be during the summer so more of it can be outdoors. I’m intrigued by the idea of a 36-hour Summat, possibly over a summer bank holiday. We tried a little tester in May with a couple of hundred people, and it was good little event. We are also keen to have even stronger partnerships so we can take our messages to wider audiences.

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More information from the Summat website: www.summat.org
You can also download the programme: www.t4p.org.uk/summat2011brochure

More about Together for Peace here.

Information about Paul Lederach’s book, The Moral Imagination, is here.

The USA can’t commit to meaningful cuts in carbon emissions; China and other developing countries refuse to budge before industrialised countries have addressed their historic legacy of pollution; the small island, least developed and African nations insist on the need to do something to avert threats to their existence; and the Europeans make positive but ineffectual noises from the sidelines. Wonderful Copenhagen in 2009? Yes, but you could almost be talking about any climate negotiation from the past twenty years – Marrakech, The Hague, Bali, Kyoto or Rio.

The depressing fact is that ever since the first climate change agreement – the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) – back in Rio in 1992, the main contours of international climate politics have remained stubbornly in place. Back then, US President George Bush Senior established the family tradition by declaring that the USA would not commit to cuts in CO₂ emissions and that America’s way of life was not up for negotiation. Back then, China, Brazil and other leading developing countries argued that principles of justice meant that industrialised countries had to cut their emissions before anything was asked of developing nations.

Today, the same standoff between principles of justice, the realities of self-interest and the ticking clock of environmental damage, remains. Now, as in 1992, the result was an agreement with no legally enforceable limits on emissions, roundly condemned by all and sundry.

True, the UNFCCC eventually give birth to its deformed, half-dead offspring, the Kyoto Protocol which did contain binding commitments from some countries. As is well known, the USA signed but never ratified that treaty and the large developing countries signed only because they had to make no cuts at all. It thus left the two largest global polluters (the USA and China) outside its remit. Even its most ardent supporters, the northern European states, have shown an inability to reach even their modest targets and the Kyoto treaty contains no effective mechanism with which to punish those who fail their obligations.

So what of the fiasco that was Copenhagen? In recent years, important shifts have occurred in climate politics, which raised hopes that Copenhagen might have delivered some kind of step forward. The science around climate change is much more well established, despite the spoiling noises of the oil industry and their media mouthpieces like Fox News and the dreadful dailies, Telegraph and Mail. And there is more widespread political agreement that something should be done.

However, despite these shifts, the pace of political change, particularly in China and the USA, is slow, leaving the two unmoving objects of climate politics – US Congressional opposition and China’s veto power – in place. Without significant change here, progress at the international level will be very difficult.

The USA

It is true that climate politics in the US have changed a great deal since Bush Junior’s much-criticised exit from the Kyoto Protocol in 2001. The USA finally has a president who takes the issue seriously and has brought the country actively back to the centre of international negotiations.

Nevertheless, within the US political system, the President’s freedom to act on the international stage is highly constrained by the need for Congressional approval, something environmental critics and other countries seemingly fail to register. George Monbiot even managed to note the critical importance of the US Senate then simply wished it away, singling out President Obama as the person to blame for the failure in Copenhagen. Such critics speak as if the President could freely choose to sign up to whatever he wanted. He cannot. More accurately, whatever the US President agrees to has to be ratified by Congress, something that has not escaped past US Presidents, from Wilson to Clinton.

While the politics within Congress, including the Senate, have changed, and there are now serious discussions around a US climate change bill, there is still considerable opposition. Perhaps more crucially, even those in Congress who favour binding emission reductions baulk at the prospect of the US agreeing to them without China and other large developing countries committing to some action as well. This was the crux of the Copenhagen impasse.

China

Like the USA, China has belatedly begun to recognise that it has some interest in having cuts to carbon emissions, partly for reasons of energy security, partly because of the likely effect of climate change on its agricultural sector and coastal cities. However, this is tempered by the view that action against climate change, in the medium term, should be the sole responsibility of industrialised countries. There is some justice to this argument: climate change has largely been created by rich countries and in terms of per capita emissions they still dwarf China’s.

But there is also a heavy dose of self-interest in China’s objections. If oil is part of the architecture of the US economy, for China it is coal. No less than the US, China’s current stance is formed with its eyes on economic growth and nurturing its global power. There are many countries that pollute much less, and will suffer much more, than China, and are ill-served by its obstructionism.

On top of this, China’s opposition to any meaningful verification measures, without which no international treaty has ever been successful, served both to meet its aim of avoiding any verifiable binding commitments at all and to protect the regime against the ‘intrusion’ of independent scrutiny of its internal affairs, something the Communist Party has never accepted.

Together, these concerns put China in the extraordinary position, in the final hours of Copenhagen, of insisting that any significant targets on limiting temperature increases or emissions be removed from the final declaration. As reported by Mark Lynas not only did China not want to sign up to commitments for itself, it didn’t want other countries to make any commitments either, for fear it would lead to increased pressure down the line on China to adopt binding targets. If this remains part of China’s strategy, it is difficult to see any possibility of progress beyond a series of broad, voluntary, individual and unverifiable promises.

While criticism of the politics around climate change in the US is entirely apt, China’s stance is extremely risky. As well as using up scarce borrowed time, environmentally speaking, it may also squander an opportunity to make limited but real progress. In a dangerous game of chicken, China seems to calculate that if it continues to play hardball, the US will eventually give in.

But current political circumstances in the USA might be as good as they will get for some time: there is a President in favour of an international agreement on climate change and the Democrats control both houses of Congress. This will not last. In all likelihood the Democrat grip will be severely weakened by the Congressional mid-term elections later this year and a second Obama term is far from certain. Whatever the issues of justice, the developing countries may have missed an opportunity to strike a limited, pragmatic deal with the US in Copenhagen.

Lessons

For their part, the Labour government strove to make Copenhagen a success, and Ed Miliband is credited (though some wouldn’t use that word) with ensuring the final declaration was in fact agreed. Gordon Brown, too, has been forceful in arguing for large financial transfers to the less developed countries, though as ever, some argue more could and should be done. The weakness of the government’s position, and that of the EU more generally, is that their domestic performance on cutting emissions is so poor, particularly when placed against some of the grander statements that both the UK government and the EU have made. It will take more than gimmicky boiler scrappage schemes to convince other nations that the UK is serious about achieving the huge cuts in emissions that it says it wants to see.

Another lesson to take from Copenhagen is that it is high time for western NGOs and other commentators to recognise that their traditional understanding of international politics (in short and with little simplification, ‘industrialised and western = venal and bad; developing and rural = noble and good’) will no longer wash, if ever it did. The very grouping together of developing countries – in this of all issues – looks increasingly anachronistic, though it serves political purposes for various governments (allying with China provides leverage for the weakest states, siding with the least developed provides ideological and moral cover for China’s intransigence). Whether this alliance will prove tenable in the long term, remains to be seen. It is hard to see how China’s refusal to cut emissions can really benefit those who will be hit first and hardest by climate change.

But perhaps the key lesson, and what is weakest in the NGO-environmentalist criticism, is any attempt to reconcile the gulf between arguments of justice and the realities of international politics. It is no good acting as if the latter simply did not exist. Certainly, it is important that arguments about justice – whether couched in terms of historical responsibilities, or in terms of per capita CO₂ emissions – are made and reiterated. But an international emissions regime in which there is an even distribution of CO₂ emissions per head is simply not attainable in the near future. It is politically, not to mention physically, unachievable in the short term and possibly never this side of a technological revolution. Moreover, because of their volume, climate change cannot be curtailed without cuts in China’s rate of emissions, regardless of issues of justice. Nor is the international political landscape – multiple states acting in their own self-interest – likely to alter anytime soon.

As ever with progressive politics, what is needed, and what is most difficult to achieve, are steps that deliver tangible progress but which also begin an inevitably slow process of bridging the gulf between present day realities and environmentally effective and socially just outcomes. Some elements of this are beginning to feature in the negotiations – large transfers of financial resources to assist the poorest countries adapt to climate change are an essential first step, regardless of any other actions. An agreed goal for mitigating climate change – whether 2^oC or 1.5^oC – signifies some progress from 20 years ago, when a vague goal of avoiding ‘dangerous’ climate change is all countries would commit to.

Beyond this, further progress will probably require a division within the developing country block, and the larger, heavily polluting countries will have to give some ground while protecting the interests of the least developed and most vulnerable. In this context, developing countries’ insistence at Copenhagen on keeping the Kyoto deal in play, looks like a major mistake.

But the really serious work will involve looking for some limited common ground between China and the US. While something may be achievable through better handling of international negotiations than was displayed in Copenhagen, the real battles will be fought in the internal political environments of these two powers, as well as others. When states’ national interests are as deadlocked as they currently seem to be – when there is only limited agreement about ends, never mind means – then international cooperation will be similarly limited. It may take much more sustained campaigning on climate change, as well as wider economic and technological change, to change governments’ views of what is in their national interest.