Urgent agenda: how climate litigation builds transnational narratives

Abstract

This article draws on the notion of co-production to assess the construction of transnational narratives in climate change litigation. Using the examples of recent cases from the Netherlands, Norway, and Ireland, the article identifies a common narrative regarding the temporal dimension of climate change and its governance. Litigants are shown to develop a notion of urgency for national climate policies with the help of symbols and discourses—including pathways, crossroads, milestones, thresholds and carbon budgets—in order to attribute meaning to complex models of the future climate, and the immediate responsibilities of states to limit future global warming. In response, states offer depictions of the future in which technological and economic evolutions render our current climate crisis less challenging and costly. This narrative approach helps make sense of the transnational legal strategies through which our understanding of responsibility and climate justice is unfolding.