Courting the Climate Crisis: Legal Engagements with Climate Politics in India
- websitenlsir
- 1 day ago
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NLSIR announces its latest Special Blog Series, entitled “Courting the Climate Crisis: Legal Engagements with Climate Politics in India.” The series features contributions from leading legal scholars, each interrogating the role of law in shaping, responding to, and resisting the climate crisis.
The conclusion of COP29 in Baku has reignited debates on equity and justice within global climate governance, with India positioned at the forefront of these discussions in the Global South. As countries in this region bear disproportionate vulnerabilities to climate change, the Supreme Court of India’s recent recognition of the right against adverse effects of climate change stands out as a landmark shift. This development underscores India’s dual role: as a key advocate for the Global South and as a jurisdiction where the judiciary plays a pivotal role in safeguarding fundamental rights against environmental harm. The climate crisis is not merely an ecological or policy issue but a challenge to our legal imagination.
In recognising a right against the adverse effects of climate change, the Supreme Court of India has offered a profound promise of legal recourse. Yet, the critical challenge lies in assessing whether legal recourse can genuinely dismantle the powerful, entrenched interests that perpetuate climate injustice, or if its impact remains a crucial, but contained, force within a far more expansive struggle.
The adequacy of legal frameworks to address the climate crisis hinges on a re-evaluation of our legal imagination's most foundational concepts. The inherent tension arises as legal paradigms, historically rooted in notions of individual property, linear causation, and national jurisdiction, strain to contain the global, non-linear, and collective nature of the climate crisis. This conceptual strain demands that legal thought not only adapt but fundamentally reconsider its analytical framework: from the very definition of 'harm' to the scope of 'rights' and the attribution of 'responsibility,' pushing law to forge new theoretical pathways that align with the complex adaptive natural world itself.
Foregrounding experiences of the Global South, the series aims to converge viewpoints on the central question: Can the law meaningfully disrupt existing power structures to advance climate justice?
NLSIR Editorial Board 2024-25*
*The Editorial Board thanks Varenya Singh for ideating the theme, and conceptualizing the series
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