“Please go to your breakout room”: researching negotiations through hybrid and digital spaces
SB60, UNFCCC Plenary Meeting, Bonn [Photo credits: author’s own]
This poster, created for the Royal Geographical Society Conference in August 2024, reflects on experiences of conducting digital and hybrid ethnographic research of negotiations and technical meetings within the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), particularly the development of the Global Goal on Adaptation (GGA) through the Glasgow-Sharm el-Sheikh (GlaSS) work programme.
Ethnographic research has been rooted in physical settings and geographically bound spaces. Yet digital technology has created new “ethnographic places” which question the importance of conducting research in-situ. Since Covid-19, an increase in the use of digital tools has changed the event landscape, enabling participation not just in-person but in myriad hybrid and digital formats. In this context, some scholars have argued that digital ethnography poses challenges to “the authenticity of what a physical site can reveal”.
This poster explores this idea, addressing online vs in-person power, as well as issues of exclusion which presents important challenges for consideration when conducting research online.
The poster makes the following conclusions:
New digital and hybrid spaces are challenging the need to conduct ethnographic research in person, creating opportunities for researchers from an energy, time, and cost perspective.
These new spaces provide a unique insight into the different experiences that play out in hybrid format and their resulting consequences for global environment agreement making.
Conducting research in digital and hybrid format highlights issues of inclusion, power and access that need to be navigated as hybrid international events become common practice.
Workshop eight of the GlaSS in hybrid format [Screenshot author’s own]
You can download the poster by Aishath Green here