Programme 02
Alter/COP Rewrites & Reboot
Every two years the network convenes to rewrite the decision documents produced by the UNFCCC Conference of the Parties. Not to comment on them — to redraft, annotate and re-language them, collectively and in public.
The premise
A problem of representation
The hypothesis is Latour and Aït-Touati’s: the failures and procrastinations of climate conferences, and the documents they produce, are essentially problems of representation. Both the representation of the problems, and the representation — in a UN-type assembly — of the human communities and other beings who make up the planet.
So we work on the documents themselves. Durational, collective, performative reworking of UNFCCC text through the lens of habitability and environmental justice, to open up discussion on alternative logics for acting collectively in the face of planetary crisis.
This is not a new idea, but it is a rare one. The Feminist Judgments Project rewrote decisions on women’s rights cases from the perspectives the originals were missing. Bolivia rewrote its constitution in 2009 to grant more power to the country’s Indigenous majority. Both show what becomes sayable when you take a governance text and draft it again.
The method comes out of the Speculative Life Research Cluster at Milieux, which in 2020 rewrote Article 6 of the Paris Agreement — the article governing carbon emissions trading.
Schedule
Five editions across seven years
Each Rewrite is hybrid, hosted at a partner institution, and open to the whole network.
Year 1
COP31
Trent University · led by Pasek
The first Rewrite establishes the method across the network.
Year 3
COP33
Concordia University · led by O'Brien
Mid-cycle, with the first two OAiS Labs feeding in field evidence.
Year 5
COP35
York University · led by Tremblay
Four labs complete; the habitability frame is tested against them.
Year 6
Reboot
Concordia, Milieux Black Box · led by Wilkie & Didur
The performed simulation. Le Théâtre des Négociations restaged.
Year 7
COP37
Trent University · led by Network
The final Rewrite consolidates seven years of alternate drafting.
Year 6 · The Reboot
Le Théâtre des Négociations, restaged
In 2015, ahead of COP21, Frédérique Aït-Touati and Bruno Latour staged Le Théâtre des Négociations: Make it Work — a simulated climate summit in which delegations represented not only states but oceans, forests, soils, and endangered species. It asked what a negotiation would look like if the parties actually included the parties.
In Year 6 the network restages it at Concordia’s Milieux Black Box, drawing on the archive of the original and on six years of Rewrites and field research. Each OAiS Lab brings a delegation grounded in a real landscape and a real community.
Outputs
What a Rewrite produces
Each edition generates a white paper and a documented intervention routed to policy makers through Future Earth, Environmental Humanities South and the BRIDGES Flagship Hub.