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Paper short abstract

This paper analyzes how the ICJ Advisory Opinion on Climate Change (2025) strengthens legal obligations for just transition, using Botswana’s coal sector as a case study. It analyzes gaps between international law and national implementation and offers practical frameworks for practitioners.

Paper long abstract

The ICJ’s 2025 Advisory Opinion on climate change has been characterized as transforming political commitment to legally binding obligations. This paper examines whether, how, and with what implications this purported shift affects just transition implementation in coal-dependent developing countries, using Botswana as a case study.

Adopting a practitioner-scholar approach the paper leverages Botswana’s just transition policy process while maintaining analytical distance through institutional analysis. This methodology bridges international climate law with implementation studies, examining how the ICJ AO strengthens the UAE JTWP’s provisions on local communities and Indigenous Peoples, reframing them as enforceable legal obligations rather than aspirational goals.

Through analysis of Botswana’s draft NDP12 and NDC, alongside semi-structured engagement with policy actors, the paper identifies gaps between emerging international legal obligations and national policy frameworks. It demonstrates how abstract legal principles translate, or fail, into concrete protections for workers and mining-dependent communities.

The paper advances scholarship in four ways: theorizing the shift from political to legal obligations as institutional reconfiguration requiring active translation work, not automatic compliance; it provides empirical evidence from a coal-dependent African economy where most literature focuses on industrialized contexts; developing a multi-scalar implementation framework linking international legal obligations to national policy architecture; and identifying how legal clarity paradoxically creates new implementation challenges requiring institutional reform beyond financial resources.

By interrogating this distinction in climate governance, the paper contributes to debates on international law’s efficacy in producing domestic policy change, arguing that legal obligations create necessary but insufficient conditions for just transition implementation.