Inclusive Solidarities: Reimagining Boundaries in Divided Times

Society for the Advancement of Socio-Economics

Montréal, Canada

July 9-12, 2025

Earlier this July, I presented at the 2025 Society for the Advancement of Socio-Economics (SASE) conference in Montréal, Québec, held at the Palais des Congrès from July 9–12. The conference theme, “Inclusive Solidarities: Reimagining Boundaries in Divided Times,” invited interdisciplinary engagement on how social, political, and economic solidarities are formed, fractured, and rebuilt in response to global crises.

I was part of a panel hosted by Network L: Regulation and Governance, which brought together scholars investigating how regulation (be it legal, institutional, or symbolic) shapes the architecture of global governance. Our session focused on the discursive and institutional dynamics behind sustainable governance. My presentation, titled “Negotiating the Global Boiling Point: Symbolic Interactions at COP29,” explored how the COP process functions not simply as a mechanism for policy coordination, but as a performance of meaning-making, where language, symbolism, and power intersect.

I applied a layered sociological framework that included symbolic interactionism, constructionism, negotiated order theory, and governmentality. Using COP29 in Baku as my case study, I argued that the summit produced symbolic legitimacy, particularly in climate finance and gender justice, while avoiding substantive transformation. My analysis centered on two negotiations:

• The vague promise to scale up climate finance to $300 billion by 2035, a target that was framed as ambitious, despite the actual need exceeding $1.3 trillion annually.

• The gender negotiations, which resulted in a 10-year extension of the Lima Work Programme on Gender, but eliminated intersectional language like “gender-based violence” and “women in all their diversity” to achieve consensus.

  
  

Through symbolic interactionism, I traced how actors assign varied meanings to key terms based on institutional histories and bloc positions. Constructionism revealed that these meanings are not created in the moment, but inherited from prior discourses. Negotiated order theory illustrated how agreements reflect strategic, temporary compromises under political pressure. Governmentality helped me show how negotiators govern themselves by internalizing national constraints, self-censoring proposals and framing them within what is deemed realistic or politically survivable.

Climate summits are not just sites of international diplomacy. They are ritualized spaces of symbolic governance, shaped by power, performance, and limitation. Understanding how actors navigate these constraints and produce consensus through strategic meaning-making is essential to understanding why even ambitious climate agreements often fall short. I hope to continue developing this work into a longer paper, connecting these theoretical insights to other climate negotiations and exploring how symbolic legitimacy sustains the procedural momentum of COP, even as substantive outcomes remain elusive.