COVID-19 has led to the postponement of next month’s annual Conference of the Parties (COP) to November 2021. A year without a COP has people asking: What will the impact be on future climate action? How do we facilitate more climate discussion? Suddenly, we want more climate talks.

This may seem like a contradiction of sorts, but the reality is that international agreements are only one product of these negotiations. Many of the successes of COP are difficult to quantify or hidden in national climate policies. Informal conversations between international stakeholders at COP can become leverage for policy change at home, as seen in the case of Chile’s ambitious voluntary coal retirement scheme. Based on 24 interviews with senior Chilean officials and decisionmakers, and members of the private sector and civil society groups, we were able to uncover some of how these talks influenced Chile’s own climate policies.

In 2017, at COP23 in Bonn, efforts to combat coal were front and center. The U.K. and Canada had just launched the Powering Past Coal Alliance, a coalition of countries that commit to phase out coal power by 2030. Despite the high-profile launch, many countries—including Chile—never signed on to the pledge. But just over a year later, Chile announced its own plan to retire its entire fleet of coal-fired power plants. What happened?

There were a handful of key developments in the aftermath of COP23. As it turns out, Marcelo Mena, the Chilean minister of environment, was interested in the Powering Past Coal Alliance (PPCA). Mena had been focused on air pollution during his tenure at the ministry, and phasing out coal would hit two birds with one stone: local air pollution and global climate change. However, when representatives of Chile’s electricity generation companies heard that Mena wanted to move forward with a coal phaseout following the PPCA model, they were not supportive. In their view, which was widespread, Chile was not ready to take on such a bold commitment without further analysis. But the generators were ready to start talking about a transition. The Association of Chilean Power Generators, a trade association of private power generation companies, also argued that such a transition needed buy-in from the private sector and other stakeholders. Instead of the Chilean government signing on to the PPCA at COP23, the electricity generators offered an alternative: They would work with the Ministry of Energy and the Ministry of Environment to find a way for Chile to phase out coal on its own terms.

Read the full article about the loss of climate negotiations by Victoria Plutshack, Claudio Huepe Minoletti, Beatriz Hernandez Perez, Paelina DeStephano, and Thomas Klug at Brookings.