Providing on-demand legal, technical and strategic advice to the Least Developed Countries Group

As early as 2001 IIED supported senior Least Developed Countries (LDC) negotiators to create their own negotiating bloc, the LDC Group. And ever since we have been working closely with the group by providing legal, technical and strategic advice in the negotiations, and building its expertise in key topics by providing research and analysis.

This work falls under a larger package of support to the LDCs, through which IIED organises capacity-building workshops, enhances the representation of LDC negotiators, provides logistical and administrative support, and helps establish an online presence for the group.

What is IIED doing?

Climate change negotiations are characterised by frequently emerging issues, technical jargon, carefully crafted wording and continuous references to various legal principles and provisions.

This proliferation of scientific, technical and legal issues, institutions and processes has prolonged and increased the work burden for already strained negotiators in the LDC Group. Even the most senior negotiators require technical advice and support to keep up with the pace of continuous and complex scientific, policy and legal information flows.

IIED's real-time legal, technical and strategic advice to the LDC Group chair and members of its core team helps to reduce this heavy burden. In addition, it helps to ensure strong group leadership, develop a long-term strategic vision, preserve institutional memory and guarantee a smooth transition as the chairmanship rotates every two years.

The group also needs strong research inputs to strengthen its arguments in the negotiations, and IIED strives to provide these. We work with senior LDC negotiators to co-produce research papers, briefings and blogs that directly inform the ongoing negotiations.

We have also produced an LDC paper series in partnership with the European Capacity Building Initiative, to provide research support and to ensure negotiators are well prepared with the facts, figures and analysis they need to drive effective decisions.