This article examines the strategic legal activity of the environmental movement in the United Kingdom over the past twenty years. Environmental non‐governmental organizations (NGOs) have increasingly turned to the courts in pursuit of their policy goals, despite significant losses on substantive legal issues, difficulties gaining standing and high costs awarded against them under the “loser pays” system. This presents a puzzle: why does the movement continue to pursue legal action in the face of what activists claim is a hostile legal opportunity structure (LOS)? This study explores this seeming paradox using a single‐country, cross‐temporal comparative approach, an original dataset of legal cases taken by NGOs as well as qualitative case studies of strategic litigation. It highlights the agency the movement exhibits within opportunity structures and suggests that NGOs that use litigation are able to highlight the failings of the existing system and improve future access to justice for themselves and other groups.
Studies of climate change litigation have proliferated over the past two decades, as lawsuits across the world increasingly bring policy debates about climate change mitigation and adaptation, as well as climate change-related loss and damage to the attention of courts. We systematically identify 130 articles on climate change litigation published in English in the law and social sciences between 2000 and 2018 to identify research trajectories. In addition to a budding interdisciplinarity in scholarly interest in climate change litigation we also document a growing understanding of the full spectrum of actors involved and implicated in climate lawsuits and the range of motivations and/or strategic imperatives underpinning their engagement with the law. Situating this within the broader academic literature on the topic we then highlight a number of cutting edge trends and opportunities for future research. Four emerging themes are explored in detail: the relationship between litigation and governance; how time and scale feature in climate litigation; the role of science; and what has been coined the "human rights turn" in climate change litigation. We highlight the limits of existing work and the need for future research-not limited to legal scholarship-to evaluate the impact of both regulatory and antiregulatory climate-related lawsuits, and to explore a wider set of jurisdictions, actors and themes. Addressing these issues and questions will help to develop a deeper understanding of the conditions under which litigation will strengthen or undermine climate governance. This article is categorized under: Policy and Governance > Multilevel and Transnational Climate Change Governance K E Y W O R D S climate change litigation, climate governance, climate lawsuits, regulation 1 | INTRODUCTIONCourts are playing an increasingly visible role in policy debates about climate change mitigation and adaptation, as well as climate change-related loss and damage. 1 Lawsuits addressing the causes and consequences of climate change-such as the expansion of airports, the reliance on coal-powered energy and the climate-related erosion of the habitats of endangered species-are increasingly apparent in national courts, and scholars even see a potential role for international tribunals to address climate harms (e.g., Bodansky, 2017;Sands, 2016). This article is, to our knowledge, the first to systematically review key literature on climate change litigation over the last 20 years. We build on this to identify new horizons for a forward-
How does an idea emerge and gain traction in the international arena when its underpinning principles are contested by powerful players? The adoption in 2013 of the Warsaw International Mechanism on Loss and Damage as part of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) puzzled observers, because key state parties, such as the United States, had historically opposed the policy. This article examines the roles of frame contestation and ambiguity in accounting for the evolution and institutionalization of the “loss and damage” norm within the UNFCCC. The article applies frame analysis to the data from coverage of the negotiations and elite interviews. It reveals that two competing framings, one focused on liability and compensation and the other on risk and insurance, evolved into a single, overarching master frame. This more ambiguous framing allowed parties to attach different meanings to the policy that led to the resolution of differences among the parties and the embedding of the idea of loss and damage in international climate policy.
What explains the likelihood that a nongovernmental organization (NGO) will turn to the courts to pursue their policy goals? This article explores the factors that influence the mobilization of law by environmental NGOs in four Western European countries. It finds that explanations focused on legal opportunity structures are unable to account for the patterns of within-country variation in legal mobilization behavior. The research also shows that bird protection NGOs as well as home-grown national environmental NGOs are generally more likely to turn to law than transnational environmental groups. Although resources and legal opportunities clearly matter to some extent, the author suggests—drawing on sociological institutionalist theory—that explanations of NGO legal mobilization should (a) incorporate an understanding of how groups frame and interpret the idea of “the law” and (b) explore the role of “strategy entrepreneurs” who promote the use of particular tactics within an organization.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.
hi@scite.ai
10624 S. Eastern Ave., Ste. A-614
Henderson, NV 89052, USA
Copyright © 2024 scite LLC. All rights reserved.
Made with 💙 for researchers
Part of the Research Solutions Family.