The TransLitigate project studies the agency of transnational strategic litigator communities working on climate change, biodiversity conservation, pollution from extractive industries, and land conflicts.
Translitigate is an EU-funded (ERC Starting Grant 2021) multidisciplinary research project that aims to how transnational collaboration networks contributes to environmental litigation. The project’s analysis focuses on three interrelated components of litigation: the modes of collaboration among litigators, dynamics of issue control in their collaborative networks, and their professional-ethical reflections.
More than 2,000 climate change-related litigation cases have been filed since 1986, with 25% of them occurring in the past 3 years, according to Joana Setzer and Catherine Higham. Our project investigates transnational networks of litigators using human rights and tort law to hold public and private actors accountable for both mitigation and adaptation obligations.
Climate change
In 2021, the Court of Appeal in the Netherlands found Royal Dutch Shell to be liable for damage caused by two oil spills in the Nigeria Delta, and similar litigation is ongoing in the United Kingdom. These cases seek to hold multinational extractives industries accountable for harm experienced by local communities near extractive sites - often far from the corporate headquarters.
Photo: Milieudefensie via Flickr (CC BY-NC-SA)
Pollution from extractive industries
Litigation has been an important tool for wildlife and biodiveristy conservation activists. New opportunities and challenges for this field arise out of the ‘rights of nature’ movement, the impacts of climate change on biodiversity, genetic engineering to ‘rewild’ endangered or extinct species, and heightened awareness of the (post-)colonial use of conservation as a tool for social oppression.
Biodiversity conservation
Increasing global demand for agricultural commodities, including soy, palm oil and beef, as well as the expansion of wind farms and hydroelectric dams, drive conflicts about access to, and ownership of, land. For example, in 2020, a Zapoteca community in Oaxaca, Mexico filed a lawsuit against the French energy company EDF in order to halt the construction of a wind farm which was authorized without sufficient consultation.
Photo: European Space Agency via Flikr (CC BY-SA 3.0 IGO)