Description
Climate change litigation, since its inception in the early 2000s and subsequent boom post-2015, has become a mainstream tool for climate and legal activists to open up new pathways for achieving climate goals worldwide. The literature has framed climate litigation as developing in ‘waves’ (Peel and Osofsky 2013) which have primarily focused on single-jurisdiction studies, regulatory outcomes, building out typologies for the expanding number of cases, and analysing the movement on a global scale (Setzer and Higham 2023; Hilson 2020; Batros and Khan 2022). However, there is limited scholarship which discusses the worldmaking potential of climate litigation and its strategic narratives.
Within International Relations (IR), worldmaking has been applied to ideas of empire, foreign policy, the making of international orders, and more (Getachew 2019; Milne 2015; Berger 2022). This paper will draw upon worldmaking’s insights into alternative worlds and knowledge structures in order to examine the construction of climate legal storytelling. Through the use of interviews with participants and text-analysis of petitions, I will uncover how plaintiffs and litigators translate environmental harm into a legal story and what visions of the future these stories are illustrating. In doing so, I hope to scrutinise who is empowered to tell stories within climate litigation and the challenges of legal frameworks in the global fight for climate justice.
