This project examines how climate activists mobilize emergency frames and legal conflicts to transform climate politics. Through juridification of climate politics, the relationship between emergency and law is becoming an object of legal conflicts negotiated in the courts, and an object of public debates negotiated in the media and the parliament.
The effects of juridification of climate politics in the name of climate emergency are poorly understood in academic scholarship and require empirical research. For instance, emergency frames and climate litigation can raise public awareness about the climate crisis and harness the legal sphere to address it. Yet this strategy can also be counterproductive to more effective climate governance, while it can also lead to the criminalization of climate activism.
This project examines the consequences of juridification of climate politics through an interdisciplinary approach from social sciences, drawing on legal anthropology and political ecology. Empirically, this project focuses on the Swiss climate movement and how it mobilizes emergency frames and legal conflicts through different forms of campaigning, protests, and court cases.
The project examines what justice claims activists articulate through different forms of campaigning and protest, what legal strategies climate activists and their lawyers adopt in lawsuits and in litigation trials in the courts, how the state responds to climate activism (through police, prosecutors, judges, legislative initiatives), to what extent climate campaigns and protests, court trials, and the role of the state contribute to public debates about climate change, democracy and civil liberties, emergency and justice, legality and legitimacy.
Methodologically, the project combines desk-based with ethnographic data collection and analysis. Drawing on interdisciplinary research, this project bridges disciplinary, conceptual and methodological silos in research on climate activism and climate litigation.
Drawing on empirical research, the project goes beyond a legal analysis of climate litigation to examine the political effects of juridification at three intertwined levels: i) the role of climate activism and litigation in climate politics and governance, ii) the role of legal conflicts in social and political change, and iii) the relationship between law, the state and civil society in emergency and climate politics.
Keywords: Climate litigation, social movements, climate politics, climate justice, political ecology, legal anthropology
Project leader: Dr. Jevgeniy Bluwstein
Scientific collaborator: Lucie Benoit (as of 1.4.2023)
Link to the SNF project
