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- Convenors:
-
Agathe Mora
(University of Sussex and University of Lausanne)
Jon Schubert (University of Basel)
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- Formats:
- Panel
- Mode:
- Face-to-face
- Location:
- Facultat de Geografia i Història 302
- Sessions:
- Thursday 25 July, -
Time zone: Europe/Madrid
Short Abstract:
What climate futures are envisioned by legal and regulatory efforts? How could anthropological analysis of these processes contribute to liberatory politics and climate justice? This panel looks at the climate futures assembled and enacted through legislation, regulation, and litigation.
Long Abstract:
The United Nations General Assembly’s adoption, in 2022, of the ‘right to a clean, healthy and sustainable environment’ as a new, universal human right, in principle paves the way for new forms of ‘doing’ climate futures through law. The exponential rise of climate litigation in the last few years likewise point to the increasing transposition of climate action to legal arenas. Such developments are indicative of broader trends in the relation between (international) law and the environment, which assembles a broad array of actors beyond nation-states.
Yet legal and regulatory frameworks, including technical and procedural standards, often stand at odds with the lived realities of the climate crisis across the globe. Efforts at climate legislation and regulation often provoke furious backlash, from deregulation and limitations on the role of courts to political and media criticism. Similarly, translating legal principles and decisions back into climate action is far from straightforward.
What is the role of a critical, engaged anthropology, beyond simply diagnosing this disconnect? If law is a means of producing anticipatory knowledge, what kinds of climate futures are envisioned by efforts to corral law and regulations to their realisation? And how could anthropological analysis of these processes contribute to liberatory politics and climate justice? To address these broader questions, we invite paper submissions dealing with the various ways in which climate futures are envisioned, assembled, and enacted through legislation, regulation, and litigation.
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Thursday 25 July, 2024, -Paper Short Abstract:
Major energy companies are no longer denying climate change, but are rejecting responsibility for its impacts in their defences against climate justice lawsuits. Large polluters try to evade legal responsibility by shifting blame to broader economic forces and invalidating scientific evidence.
Paper Abstract:
In recent litigation against major greenhouse gas emitters over their contribution to climate change, fossil fuel companies are no longer denying that human activities are causing global warming. Rather, they make political arguments about the responsibility of society – rather than individual polluters – for causing global warming. In addition, they question the validity of climate science for establishing legal responsibility. This paper analyzes corporate defendants’ evidentiary arguments in four climate change lawsuits. I examine the defendants’ efforts to obfuscate the role of individual emitters, invalidate scientific proof and attack researchers’ credibility. Plaintiffs’ and defendants’ legal narratives and factual claims are linked to broader concerns about who should take responsibility for climate change. Like all knowledge, climate science is inherently value-imbued, emerging in relation to policymakers’ demands, public concerns and researchers’ academic interests. While climate science on its own does not provide all the answers, it serves as a crucial tool for addressing legal and political questions about responsibility and justice in a warming world.
Paper Short Abstract:
What does the law need to know to decarbonize the steel and aluminium sectors in the EU? This paper examines how industrial sector stakeholders deal with the EU’s new Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism decarbonization imperative. It highlights the interdependencies impeding decarbonized futures.
Paper Abstract:
Multi-sited and multi-level ethnographies are needed to highlight the interdependencies between states, energy systems, traders and industrial producers which make decarbonization so difficult. Focusing ethnographically on the multi-sited implementation of the EU’s Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism (CBAM), a key element of the EU’s Green Deal legislative package, this paper makes the case for a holistic anthropology of the study of climate regulation for decarbonization. CBAM has a dual aim of affecting both domestic emissions by setting an effective price on carbon for hard to abate European industries under the Emissions Trading System (ETS) and to affect change beyond the borders of the EU by imposing a carbon tax on imports of these same sectors to Europe. CBAM is a pioneering policy of its kind and is set to shape the future of carbon pricing globally. In the early stages of its implementation many things remain unclear: from the distributive impacts of CBAM to the methodology to be used for carbon accounting. CBAM is thus raising concerns and speculation across affected industrial sectors. This paper examines how European industrialists of the steel and aluminum sector, commodity traders and unions deal with CBAM’s decarbonization imperative. Outlining their uncertainties, fears and challenges, it asks what does the ‘law’ need to know to deliver decarbonization at a later stage? Beyond tracing the gap between climate regulations and their implementation, I argue that anthropology can provide important insights into energy futures and investment trends, by examining challenges in the present.
Paper Short Abstract:
In a class-action lawsuit, Kabwe, Zambia is strategically abjected by lawyers to create visibility of harm in hopes of environmental justice. This paper explores the tensions between the strategy of abjection and the experience of abjection and how toxic narratives shape futures.
Paper Abstract:
In 2020, a class-action lawsuit was filed against Anglo American South Africa to account for decades of lead poisoning in Kabwe, Zambia. Lawyers from London and Johannesburg filed the suit on behalf of Kabwe residents. Increasingly, litigation is used as a strategy to address environmental harm. The plaintiffs' legal team has been set with the task of making sense of the legacy pollution in the courts and the media. Since experiences of legacy pollution and slow violence are often “resistant to dramatic packaging” (Nixon 2011), one way for the lawyers to make sense of the lead poisoning is through the construction of the narrative of Kabwe as “the most toxic town in the world.” I understand the narrativisation of Kabwe by the plaintiffs’ legal team to be a strategic abjection. Abjection is used as a legal strategy to create visibility of harm, in hopes of environmental justice, but how does this strategy also create experiences of marginalisation and injustice? In this paper, I explore how legal professionals strategically abject Kabwe to achieve goals of the lawsuit and the harms incurred when the language of toxicity is applied beyond the site of contamination. For Kabwe residents, the toxic narrative conflicts with and limits their visions of the future. With an increase in environmental litigation, anthropological analysis serves to evaluate the strategies and discourses employed in the legal sphere to consider how climate justice is being pursued and what types of futures and narratives are shaped through the pursuit of justice.
Paper Short Abstract:
Drawing on an analysis of criminal trials against climate activists in Switzerland, we examine how activists' political demands are articulated and transformed in criminal courts, and how the judiciary is undoing activists' climate justice claims through these trials.
Paper Abstract:
In this paper, we contribute to the growing field of climate litigation by offering a critical analysis of criminal trials against climate activists who have engaged in civil disobedience in the name of the climate emergency. Drawing on an analysis of criminal trials against climate activists in Switzerland, we examine how activists' political demands are articulated and transformed in criminal courts, and how the judiciary is undoing climate justice claims through these trials. Ultimately, we seek to advance a critical understanding of climate litigation and its political limits by highlighting I) the role of activists, lawyers and judges in (de)politicizing environmental justice claims, and II) the broader political economic context in which the adjudication of civil disobedience takes place through criminal trials.
Paper Short Abstract:
This paper delves into justice aspects of Norway's attempt to 'green' oil and gas by electrifying production. As electrification plans create a cascade of pressures on local and indigenous ways of life in Finnmark, planning, litigation and indigenous rights all come to matter for the region's future
Paper Abstract:
Whilst Norway has pledged to be part of the green transition, the mantra by leading actors in politics and industry alike is to ‘develop, not dismantle’ the Norwegian petroleum industry. To continue and expand production, the industry is ‘going green’ by electrifying production – a solution which demands a cascade of new energy infrastructure across the country.
In Finnmark, part of Sápmi and Norway’s northernmost county, electrifying the Melkøya LNG plant means onshore wind power and power grids are being planned on land currently used for indigenous reindeer herding, harvesting, tourism and outdoor recreation. Many of those opposing such plans look to a 2021 landmark Supreme court ruling from the southern part of Sápmi, which stated two wind power plants were invalid as they denied the reindeer herders the right to practice their culture. Though the government has been slow to rectify this human rights violation, the case is seen as a precedence for environmental justice in the Norwegian system. Simultaneously, recent legislative changes give more power to municipalities in the planning of wind power, which poses new questions of procedural and recognition justice in areas where the indigenous users of land are not always represented in local politics.
Tracing local resistance against new large-scale energy infrastructure in Finnmark, this paper looks at how an ethnographic approach can follow the mobilization across ways of being on the land, political avenues, protest, public hearings and litigation, which all point to other, possible climate futures in the region.