Description
Climate litigation is increasingly imagined as a tool for pursuing climate justice by compelling states and corporations to reduce emissions, fund adaptation, compensate for loss and damage, or recognise climate-related rights violations. Yet this debate often assumes that climate harm results from failures to prevent, regulate, or remedy environmental damage. This paper argues that, in some contexts, environmental vulnerability is actively produced through governance.
I develop the concept of manufactured insecurity to describe how political authorities intensify environmental vulnerability through policy choices, uneven development, resource mismanagement, and coercive responses, before reframing the resulting crisis as disorder, irresponsibility, or a threat to stability. Using Iran’s water crisis, particularly the Zayandeh River crisis in Isfahan, the paper examines how environmental harm becomes difficult to contest when the state controls both the material production and public interpretation of crisis.
Affected communities then face a double injustice: exposure to ecological loss and livelihood destruction, followed by the securitisation of their demands for remedy. The paper asks whether climate litigation can deliver justice where legal institutions are embedded in the same political order that produced the harm. It argues that litigation’s potential depends on whether law can recognise state-produced vulnerability as a form of responsibility.