Christina Figueres had been appointed Executive Secretary of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) in July 2010. Her job was to change the course of the dwindling climate negotiations, an enormous responsibility that came with very little authority. It was entirely up to the 195 UN member state governments to develop, agree and commit to a deal.  

This was a classic task of systems leadership – she could nudge and encourage and foster, but she could not direct or command or control.  

Figueres saw the complexity of the task and chose to start with optimism. Stubborn optimism, she called it, as all evidence pointed to failure as the likely outcome. Rifts between countries ran far deeper than climate, and there was growing discord between richer countries with higher emissions and those still seeking to industrialise.  

She started by changing the tone, finding small areas where she could see hope – focusing on technological innovation which was showing enormous progress. She saw the readiness of some large oil companies to start investing in renewable energy to secure their long-term business viability. She leveraged these as signals of change to encourage governments to follow suit. Addressing climate change was not just a moral responsibility, but a necessary opportunity for them to achieve their own national goal for development, economic growth, and other core interests.  It was essential for each of the 195 countries to see what was in it for them.  

The structure of the Paris Accord did not require countries to agree on a similar worldview, or make generic commitments, but rather prompted them to develop a shared understanding of a policy problem (stopping global warming by reducing greenhouse gas emissions) that they could each solve in different ways. At the same time, it tied these Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs) in a collective accountability framework with a clear goal – to keep global warming under 2 Celsius.

The Paris Accord, though laden with challenges in practice, showed how collective action is much more than simply getting people to agree and align. It requires both technical and social savvy to understand where challenges are coming from to then find ways to get through them. It requires a courageous determination to achieve the outcome, but incredible flexibility about how to get there. Figueres, and the many other systems leaders who helped foster the Paris Accord, saw that traditional mechanisms would not succeed and recognised the role that companies, technology, and other actors had to play in bring about a diplomatic resolution.