Presentation short abstract

Climate litigation is reshaping climate governance as courts reinterpret state obligations, expand accountability mechanisms, and challenge regulatory backsliding. This paper critically examines the growing juridification of climate governance and its emancipatory potential and its limitations.

Presentation long abstract

This paper examines how climate litigation and constitutional climate governance are—or are not—reshaping the modalities of power, expertise, and accountability that constitute climate governmentality in the Paris Era. Drawing on recent empirical and doctrinal developments, as well as the Brazilian Supreme Court’s landmark judgments on the Climate Fund (PSB et al. v. Brazil), the paper argues that law has increasingly become a central technology through which climate governance is exercised, contested, and recalibrated. The rapid expansion of climate litigation in Brazil, including systemic actions and the dominance of public prosecutors as claimants, illustrates how judicial processes function as mechanisms of oversight, policy correction, and counter-mobilization against regulatory dismantling. At the international level, recent advisory opinions issued by the International Court of Justice (ICJ), the Inter-American Court of Human Rights (IACtHR), and the International Tribunal for the Law of the Sea (ITLOS) frame climate harms as violations of human rights and state obligations, thereby transforming normative expectations around mitigation, adaptation, and intergenerational justice. Courts are redefining the boundaries of state discretion, reshaping separation-of-powers dynamics, and reasserting environmental protection as a constitutional imperative. Yet they also expose tensions inherent to climate governmentality: technocratic dependence on expertise, uneven access to justice, and the reproduction of exclusions within legal processes. By analyzing these dynamics, the paper offers a renewed critical perspective on how climate governance is being juridified, politicized, and reconfigured across contested power–knowledge assemblages.