Paper short abstract:

Climate change will exacerbate drought and drought-induced migration, making the evolution of drought governance frameworks a matter of central importance. Drought litigation from southern Africa adds to transnational environmental governance of this risk.

Paper long abstract:

Scholarship on transnational environmental governance recognizes that traditional national and international regimes of environmental law are insufficient to respond to pressing issues of global environmental concern. Transnational law is international, national and transnational all at once, providing opportunities for a wider range of social actors to contribute to the principles that govern humanity's response to pressing, overlapping existential crises, including through actions brought before the courts. Mainstream climate scholarship recognizes the contribution of climate litigation to transnational environmental governance, but the cases and scholarship reflect a mitigation bias. Using a risk-thematic approach to identifying climate cases in Africa, this paper explores the contribution of drought litigation to transnational governance, with the emphasis falling more squarely on alleviating and responding to climate risk. The impacts of climate change vary in time, and space, but the extreme event of drought has global ramifications - for regions impacted by drought and drought-induced migration. These impacts are projected to increase with increased global warming. This makes the manner in which courts are already dealing with conflicts arising from drought a matter of central importance. To illustrate the contribution of drought litigation to transnational climate governance, the paper explores a number of drought litigation cases from drought-prone southern Africa.