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Paper short abstract:

Communities affected by mining in the global South are collaborating with advocacy partners to sue mining corporations in foreign courts over harms caused at extraction sites. This paper explores the scope of this transnational tort litigation to facilitate justice from the communities’ perspective.

Paper long abstract:

The urgency of the energy transition is increasing demand for critical minerals which are essential for clean energy resources. However, this is also increasing the risk of harms to local people and environments at the front line of resource extraction (Business and Human Rights Resource Centre 2024). In response, coalitions of actors from the Global South and North are employing transnational litigation strategies to sue the perpetrators of environmental and human rights abuses for damages in foreign courts (Bouwer 2021). While global regulatory capitalism typically protects the interests of private sector actors, this ‘transnational civil litigation’ is destabilising long held boundaries between parent and subsidiary companies and between jurisdictions in the Global North and South (Bertram 2022).

This paper draws on cases from mines in Zambia and Tanzania and asks how communities adversely affected by resource extraction experience the process of seeking remedy in foreign courts for the harms they experienced and what the litigation outcomes mean for them. Examining how regulations, campaign coalitions and corporations transcend political boundaries, this paper explores the power relations shaping transnational litigation strategies and questions whether this form of resistance increases corporate accountability or reproduces power asymmetries between the Global North and South. Taking a cultural political economy approach, the analysis considers how actors’ differing knowledge, identities and visions of mining and regulation may complicate the ability of transnational litigation to deliver justice for communities.