When Christine Peringer attended her first United Nations climate conference in 2019, she was not exactly impressed. As a professional facilitator and a member of Mediators Beyond Borders International, she said she was “appalled” by the “lack of sophistication in their methods of running the meetings.”

She described the typical rigmarole: First, delegates gather for a plenary session, where they can deliver surface-level position statements about some draft text prepared by the conference’s chair. Then they break out into small groups and “just start working things out very quickly,” with people agreeing or objecting as they go — sometimes they talk over one another, sometimes they fail to translate interjections into non-English languages. It gets worse in the final hours, when delegate

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