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Trust in the chairs of global negotiations is a decisive factor facilitating successful outcomes. When negotiators trust the chair, they allow her to go beyond her formal procedural role by acting as a mediator, fostering the reaching of agreement. Negotiating parties must consent to a chair assuming substantive mediation functions. They cede parts of their control over the process to the chair when they are confident that the chair is competent and acts in good faith and everyone's interest. In this article, we develop a detailed conceptualization of trust in chairs of global negotiations and demonstrate its impact in two cases of United Nations negotiations that aimed to deliver a universal deal on climate change: the failed 2009 round in Copenhagen, and the 2015 round that culminated in the adoption of the Paris Agreement.

Capacity-building projects can be a vehicle for fostering policy diffusion. They should not, however, be considered as exclusively externally driven; the receiving jurisdiction’s receptiveness and leverage to steer the design of those projects can be crucial factors, shaping the process of infusing different external policy expertise and experiences into domestic policy design and implementation. This article shows that the Chinese National Development and Reform Commission (NDRC) has played a key role in steering the capacity-building efforts of external financiers in the case of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions trading. The focus here is twofold: analyzing, on the one hand, the interaction among capacity-building projects financed by different external financiers, and on the other, the role that central actors and brokers can play in the complex structure of interacting projects.

This working paper responds to calls for practical and implementable changes that can enhance global justice. It applies the GLOBUS conception of justice as mutual recognition to global negotiations, which have become prominent arenas for questions of distributive justice between the North and South across multiple issue areas including trade, climate change and environmental protection. Yet the focus of this paper is procedural justice. The case of the French Presidency of the 2015 UN negotiations that led to the adoption of the Paris Agreement on Climate Change is studied and put forward as a positive example of a just process. Furthermore, it is argued that procedural justice was instrumental in facilitating the reaching of agreement by increasing delegates' willingness to agree. Previous accounts of procedural justice at the global level are largely concerned with questions of transparency and representativeness. By framing procedural justice around the concept of mutual recognition, it offers a more comprehensive understanding which is aligned with psychological accounts of procedural justice. In this way, it recognises the importance of individuals and socio-psychological considerations in international relations.

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