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On being companions and strangers: Lawyers and the production of international climate law

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  13 September 2019

Sarah Mason-Case
Sarah Mason-Case*
Affiliation:
Osgoode Hall Law School, 4700 Keele St, North York, ON M3J 1P3, Canada
*
Email: [email protected]
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Abstract

International climate law is often represented as a set of rules and institutions that scholars have tracked for nearly 30 years, whether to document them, assess their effectiveness, or prescribe reforms. This article, in contrast, adopts a critical perspective to uncover the everyday life of international climate law. From this viewpoint, international climate law is a purposive endeavour that is grounded in the small places where people create and live out the law. ‘International climate lawyers’ are among those who produce the law within these sites, and they propagate international climate law across multiple institutions. Using legal-ethnographic description, the article shows how lawyers operationalize the law in the United Nations climate regime, World Bank, and international human rights system. In each case, lawyers effect some overlapping aspirations for the law as well as legal techniques, but they also adapt their practices to the places where they work. In the process, they simultaneously build and diversify their professional community. Both in their field and community then, lawyers generate heterogeneity and homogeneity through the proliferation of international climate law. They do so on multiple registers, in terms of diverging ethical commitments, multivalent legal forms, and relative authority to speak the law, notably between institutions and the Global North and Global South. If lawyers reproduce sameness and difference in international climate law, moreover, this article suggests they may reify analogous traits in the broader field of international law, including persisting power relations.

Keywords

climate changeinternational legal theorylegal professionalismpractice theoryscholarly praxis
Type
ORIGINAL ARTICLE
Information
Leiden Journal of International Law , Volume 32 , Issue 4 , December 2019 , pp. 625 - 651
Copyright
© Foundation of the Leiden Journal of International Law 2019 

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Footnotes

*

I am indebted to the anonymous reviewers and LJIL editors who provided thoughtful and incisive comments that made this article appreciably stronger. I am also grateful to Jutta Brunnée, Laurence Helfer, Jedidiah Kroncke, and Christina Voigt for their comments on parts or all of earlier drafts; to Karen Alter, Steven Bernstein, Jaye Ellis, Matthew Hoffmann, Frédéric Mégret, Nathan Yaffe, and other participants responding to versions presented at different meetings; and to the ‘international climate lawyers’ who generously agreed to be interviewed for this article and who gave comments on prior drafts. This article has changed substantially over time with review and reflection, and all views and errors are my own.

References

1 Peel, J., ‘Climate Change Law: The Emergence of a New Legal Discipline’, (2008) 32 Melb.U.L.Rev 922 Google Scholar; Brunnée, J., Mayer, B. and Zahar, A. (eds.), ‘Special Issue on Climate Law as a New Discipline’, (2018) 8(3–4) Climate Law 135 Google Scholar; D. Bodansky, J. Brunnée and L. Rajamani, International Climate Change Law (2017); K. Gray, R. Tarasofsky and C. Carlarne (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of International Climate Change Law (2016); B. Mayer, The International Law on Climate Change (2018).

2 Mayer, B., ‘The Critical Functions of Scholarship in Climate Law’, (2018) 8(3–4) Climate Law 151 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; S. Humphreys and Y. Otomo, ‘Theorizing International Environmental Law’, in A. Orford and F. Hoffman (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of The Theory of International Law (2016), 800 (commenting on the lack of theoretical accounts of international environmental law). Notable exceptions from different viewpoints include F. Johns, ‘Receiving Climate Change’, in F. Johns (ed.), Non-Legality in International Law: Unruly Law (2013), at 153; J. Dehm, ‘International Law, Temporalities and Narratives of the Climate Crisis’, (2016) 4 LRIL 167; J. Brunnée and S. Toope, Legitimacy and Legality in International Law: An Interactional Account (2010), at 126–219; infra note 4.

3 B. Mayer, ‘Climate Change and International Law in the Grim Days’, (2013) 24 EJIL 947.

4 See, e.g., Dehm, supra note 2; Johns, supra note 2; J. Dehm, ‘Reflections on Paris: Thoughts toward a Critical Approach to Climate Law’, (2018) RQDI 61; L. Godden, ‘Death, Desire, Modernity and Redemption: Climate Change and Public International Environmental Law’, 10 MJIL 543; Jasanoff, S., ‘A New Climate for Society’, (2010) 27 Theory, Culture & Society 233 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

5 Merry, S. E., ‘Anthropology of International Law’, (2006) 35 Annual Review of Anthropology 99 CrossRefGoogle Scholar, 111, cited in L. Eslava and S. Pahuja, ‘Beyond the (Post)Colonial: TWAIL and the Everyday Life of International Law’, (2012) 45 VRÜ 195, 218.

6 The scant practice accounts on topic are quite diverse. See, e.g., Johns, supra note 2; Brunnée and Toope, supra note 2; Boyd, W., ‘Climate Change, Fragmentation and the Challenges of Global Environmental Law: Elements of a Post-Copenhagen Assemblage’, (2010) 32 U. Pa. J. Int’l L. 457 Google Scholar; M. Tehan et al., The Impact of Climate Change Mitigation on Indigenous and Forest Communities: International, National and Local Law Perspectives on REDD+ (2018).

7 G. F. Sinclair, To Reform the World: International Organizations and the Making of Modern States (2017), 8; S. Ranganathan, ‘Legality and Lawfare in Regime Implementation’, in N. Rajkovic, T. Aalberts and T. Gammeltoft-Hansen (eds.), The Power of Legality: Practices of International Law and their Politics (2016), 288.

8 Ranganathan, ibid.

9 See, e.g., M. Koskenniemi, ‘International Law in a Post-Realist Era’, (1995) 16 AYBIL 1, at 17; contributions in A. Bianchi, D. Peat and M. Windsor (eds.), Interpretation in International Law (2015); J. d’Aspremont et al. (eds.), International Law as a Profession (2017).

10 Research for this article involved interviews and archival study. Interviews were conducted with 19 lawyers who work to a degree with international law relating to climate change in private firms, international institutions, a tribunal, government, universities and, in some capacity, the UN climate regime. Of these lawyers, four were based in Africa, three in Europe, three in Asia, three in Australia, and six in North America. Several lawyers also commented on full or partial drafts. The case studies are primarily based on publicly available interviews, CVs, and biographies, and analysis of primary documents (e.g., submissions, official documents, press releases, newspaper articles). Data was interpreted to construct a descriptive narrative. My method is interpretive, rather than empirical, and prioritizes theoretical representation. It oscillates between presenting context, meso- and micro-level practices, resources, epistemic dispositions and theoretical abstraction. See Sinclair, supra note 7 (on constructing a ‘history of the present’); note 175, infra (on descriptive methods).

11 Eslava and Pahuja, supra note 5, at 215.

12 1992 United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change 1771 UNTS 107 (FCCC).

13 For an account of the expansion of the rule of international law and its reach into domestic jurisdictions before and after the UN Declaration of International Law see S. Pahuja, Decolonizing International Law: Development, Economic Growth and the Politics of Universality (2011), 172–253.

14 The term ‘regime’ in this article reflects a narrow definition used from the 1980s to identify treaty-based infrastructure for diplomatic conferencing. Actors inside regimes habitually use this definition as do international relations and international law scholars. For a review of definitions see M. Young (ed.), Regime Interaction in International Law: Facing Fragmentation (2012).

15 The push to expand the authority of international institutions after the Cold War was imbricated with elements of ‘liberal internationalism’, including a renewed interest in political science and democratic governance, as noted in D. Joyce, ‘Liberal Internationalism’, in A. Orford and F. Hoffman (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of The Theory of International Law (2016), 471, at 482.

16 UNGA, Protection of the Global Climate for Present and Future Generations of Mankind, UN Doc. A/RES/43/53 (1988); Malta Resource Authority, ‘Climate Change – Introduction’, available at www.mra.org.mt/climate-change/climate-change-introduction/; N. Martinez Gutierrez, Serving the Rule of International Maritime Law: Essays in Honour of Professor David Joseph Attard (2010).

17 He first did so in a letter to the Times (London). Malta Resource Authority, ibid.

18 UNGA, First Committee Debate, UN Doc. A/C.1/PV/1515-1516 (1967).

19 S. Ranganathan, ‘Global Commons’, (2016) 27 EJIL 693, at 708–9, 715.

20 Malta was a member of the Non-Aligned Movement that proposed the UN Decade of International Law shortly after. UNGA, Provisional Verbatim Record of the Thirty-Fifth Meeting, UN Doc. A/43/PV.35 (1988), 7–8.

21 It is possible the North-South inferences were also a concern. See, e.g., ibid.; A. Cançado Trindade and D. Attard, ‘The Implications of the “Common Concern of Mankind” Concept on Global Environmental Issues’, in T. Iwama, Policies and Laws on Global Warming: International and Comparative Analysis (1991), 8; D. Bodansky, ‘The United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change: A Commentary’, (1993) 18 YJIL 451, 465.

22 Malta then co-ordinated a legal experts’ meeting with the UNEP on the concept of common concern: Cançado Trindade and Attard, ibid.

23 R. Rochon, D. Attard and R. Beetham, ‘Legal and Institutional Mechanisms’, in Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (ed.), Climate Change: The IPCC Response Strategies (1990).

24 Albeit, Malta’s status as a former British colony somewhat muddles this dynamic.

25 On the history of North-South dynamics in early environmental negotiations see L. Rajamani, Differential Treatment in International Environmental Law (2006), 13–20, 54–61; S. Bernstein, The Compromise of Liberal Environmentalism (2001). On the rationality of development and its deradicalizing relationship with decolonization see Pahuja, supra note 13, 44–94 (also dating the modern logic of development to the Truman plan of 1949).

26 Lawyers were also involved in preparing the Brundtland Report on the commission and an expert group that recommended core legal principles. See Report of the World Commission on Environment and Development: Our Common Future (1987) (Brundtland Report), Annex 1.

27 Bodansky, supra note 21, at footnote 125.

28 Ibid.

29 Ibid.; Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (ed.), Climate Change: The IPCC Response Strategies (1990), xxviii.

30 UNGA, Protection of Global Climate for Present and Future Generations of Mankind, UN Doc. A/RES/45/212 (1990); Bodansky, Brunnée and Rajamani, supra note 1, at 101.

31 D. Zaelke and J. Cameron, ‘Global Warming and Climate Change: An Overview of the International Legal Process’, (1990) 5 AUILR 249.

32 See, e.g., L. Mazur and L. Miles, Conversations with Green Gurus: The Collective Wisdom of Environmental Movers and Shakers (2009), 27, 30–7; P. Sands, Principles of International Environmental Law (1994), Acknowledgments.

33 CIEL, ‘2009 International Environmental Law Award Recipients – CIEL Co-Founders and United Nations Environment Programme’, available at www.ciel.org/about-us/2009-international-environmental-law-award-recipients-ciel-co-founders-united-nations-environment-programme; Mazur and Miles, ibid., 35.

34 Zaelke and Cameron, supra note 31.

35 Mazur and Miles, supra note 32, at 35.

36 FCCC, Art. 3(3); Mazur and Miles, ibid., at 36.

37 Interview 14 (March 2017).

38 Examples include Legal Response International, Baker & McKenzie (headquartered in Australia with various locations in the South), and the Institute for International Environment and Development.

39 Interview 14 (March 2017).

40 For example, ‘Young African Lawyers (YAL) Programme on Climate Change’, available at www.climdev-africa.org/sites/default/files/DocumentAttachments/Young%20Lawyers%20programme%20on%20climate%20change%20EN.pdf.

41 Interview 14 (March 2017).

42 Interview 20 (July 2017).

43 On this point respecting India see L. Rajamani, ‘India’s Approach to International Law in the Climate Change Regime’, (2017) 57 IJIL 1.

44 Mazur and Miles, supra note 32, at 36.

45 On the notion of a culture of legality see J. Brunnée and S. J. Toope, ‘The Rule of Law in an Agnostic World: the Prohibition on the Use of Force and Humanitarian Exceptions’, in W. Werner, M. de Hoon and A. Galan (eds.), The Law of International Lawyers: Reading Martti Koskenniemi (2017), 137.

46 Bodansky et al., supra note 1, at 55–6, 68–70.

47 The COP is the supreme body mandated to advance the Convention’s implementation. It issues decisions and can negotiate new instruments binding upon a form of state consent: FCCC, Arts. 7, 15–17.

48 On the legality of COP decisions see especially J. Brunnée, ‘COPing with Consent: Law-making under Multilateral Environmental Agreements’, (2002) 15 LJIL 1.

49 Weisser, F., ‘Practices, Politics, Performativities: Documents in the International Negotiations on Climate Change’, (2014) 40 Political Geography 46 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

50 On drafting techniques see S. Biniaz, ‘Comma but Differentiated Responsibilities: Punctuation and 30 Other Ways Negotiators Have Resolved Issues in the International Climate Change Regime’, (2016) 6 MJEAL 37.

51 For a review of legal form in the regime see L. Rajamani, ‘The 2015 Paris Agreement: Interplay between Hard, Soft and Non-Obligations’, (2016) 28 JEL 337.

52 This was referred to as the ‘Legal and Linguistic Committee’. The committee checked for formal attributes of the text without adjusting content.

53 Interview 20 (July 2017).

54 These were the ‘Compliance’ and ‘Intergovernmental Conference and Affairs’ programs.

55 FCCC, Proposed Programme Budget for the Biennium 2008–2009: Note by the Executive Secretary, FCCC/SBI/2007/8 (2007).

56 Interview 21 (July 2017). Secretariat lawyers also draft procurement and other contracts.

57 Bernstein, S. et al., ‘A Tale of Two Copenhagens: Carbon Markets and Climate Governance’, (2010) 39(1) Millennium: Journal of International Studies 161 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

58 Lawyers contributed to the Kyoto Protocol in several ways. For instance, government and NGO lawyers in the US acquainted with domestic emissions trading schemes advocated for design elements and sat on negotiating delegations. A FIELD partner also helped convert a radical proposal by Brazil to garnish penalties from non-compliant states in the North for redistribution to the South into the CDM. See, e.g., Lovell, H. and Ghaleigh, N. S., ‘Climate Change and the Professions: the Unexpected Places and Spaces of Carbon Markets’, (2013) 38 Boundary Crossings 512 Google Scholar, 514; M. Mehling, ‘Interview with Annie Petsonk’, (2017) 11 CCLR 201, at 201; J. Wiener, ‘Something Borrowed for Something Blue: Legal Transplants and the Evolution of Global Environmental Law’, (2001) 27 ELQ 1295; J. Werksman and J. Cameron, ‘The Clean Development Mechanism: the “Kyoto Surprise”’, in L. Gómez-Echeverri (ed.), Climate Change and Development (2000).

59 D. Freestone, The World Bank and Sustainable Development: Legal Essays (2012), 9; Shihata, I. F. I., ‘The World Bank and the Environment: A Legal Perspective’, (1992) 16 Md. J. Int’l L. 1 Google Scholar.

60 Ibid.; World Bank, ‘Environmental Aspects of Bank Work’, Operational Manual Statement 2.26 (1984); World Bank, Environment, Growth and Development (1987).

61 See, e.g., Bernstein, supra note 25, at 74; Brundtland Report, supra note 26, paras. 99, 103, 107.

62 World Bank, Board of Directors, Resolution No. 91-5 (1991); Freestone, supra note 59, at 113–16, 166.

63 The Green Climate Fund has joined the facility in overseeing the financial mechanism for the UN climate regime. The World Bank is interim trustee and it is independently administered: FCCC, Arts. 11, 21(3); FCCC, Cancun Agreements, Decision 1/CP.16, FCCC/CP/2010/Add.1 (2011), para. 107.

64 It also has this two-way relationship with human rights. See A. Anghie, ‘International Financial Institutions’, in C. Reus-Smit (ed.), The Politics of International Law (2009), 217; Bernstein, supra note 25, at 74–5; World Bank, World Development Report 1992: Development and the Environment (1992).

65 However, groundwork to establish the fund at the World Bank had already been laid before the announcement: Freestone, supra note 59, 173–4.

66 Ibid.

67 Ibid.; C. Streck, ‘Ensuring New Finance and Real Emission Reduction: A Critical Review of the Additionality Concept’, (2011) 2 CCLR 158, 162.

68 Of course, Bank-led reforms to domestic institutions influence market structures: Anghie, supra note 64.

69 Freestone, supra note 59, at 86; D. Freestone, ‘The UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, the Kyoto Protocol, and the Kyoto Mechanisms’, in D. Freestone and C. Streck (eds.), Legal Aspects of Implementing the Kyoto Protocol Mechanisms (2005), 19.

70 Freestone, supra note 59, at 174.

71 Kyoto Protocol, Art. 12(10).

72 Freestone, supra note 59, at 173–4; IBRD, Amended and Restated Instrument Establishing the Prototype Carbon Fund, Resolution 99-1 (1999).

73 S. Mason-Case, ‘Kyoto Protocol’, in J. d’Aspremont and C. Brölmann (eds.), Oxford International Organizations (2018).

74 D. Freestone, ‘The International Climate Change Legal and Institutional Framework: An Overview’, in D. Freestone and C. Streck (eds.), Legal Aspects of Carbon Trading: Kyoto, Copenhagen and Beyond (2009), 1 at 18; Freestone, supra note 59, at 93.

75 Freestone, supra note 59, at 93.

76 M. Wilder and L. Fitz-Gerald, ‘Carbon Contracting’, in Freestone and Streck, supra note 74, 295, at 296–9; M. Mehling, ‘Interview with David Freestone’, (2017) 11 CCLR 196, at 196.

77 Mehling, ibid.

78 The Prototype Carbon Fund included joint implementation projects, but these decreased as the eligibly of credits from the year 2000 under the Kyoto Protocol was unclear. Freestone, supra note 59, at 21–2.

79 Ibid.

80 C. Streck, ‘World Bank Carbon Finance Business: Contracts and Emission Reductions Purchase Transactions’ in D. Freestone and C. Streck (eds.), Legal Aspects of Implementing the Kyoto Protocol Mechanisms (2005), 361.

81 Kyoto Protocol, Art. 12(7).

82 Wilder and Fitz-Gerald, supra note 76, 297.

83 Interview 17 (September 2016).

84 D. Ratliff, ‘Dispute Settlement in “Flexible-Mechanism” Contracts’, in D. Freestone and C. Streck (eds.), Legal Aspects of Implementing the Kyoto Protocol Mechanisms (2005), 396.

85 Streck, supra note 80.

86 Wilder and Fitz-Gerald, supra note 76, at 296.

87 FCCC, Art. 4(1). On objects of international law see J. Hohmann and D. Joyce (eds.), International Law’s Objects (2019).

88 J. Dehm, ‘One Tonne of Carbon Dioxide Equivalent (1tCO2e)’, in J. Hohmann and D. Joyce (eds.), International Law’s Objects (2019), 305.

89 Comments by M. Wilder in International Emissions Trading Association, ‘From Kyoto to Paris: An Oral History of the Carbon Market’, available at www.ieta.org/kyototoparis.

90 P. Manning, ‘Bringing Law into the Right Environment’, Sydney Morning Herald, 18 August 2012.

91 Shihata, supra note 59, at 8.

92 He was also a legal advisor to the Vice President for Environmentally and Socially Sustainable Development.

93 Aside from practitioner manuals cited throughout this article, Baker & McKenzie published the ‘CDM Rulebook’ (no longer available): Lovell and Ghaleigh, supra note 58, at 514.

94 A.-M. Klijn, J. Gupta and A. Nijboer, ‘Privatizing Environmental Resources: The Need for Supervision of Clean Development Mechanism Contracts?’, (2009) 18 RECIEL 172, at 176; K. Kulovesi, ‘Exploring the Landscape of Climate Law and Scholarship: Two Emerging Trends’, in E. Hollo, K. Kulovesi and M. Mehling (eds.), Climate Change and the Law (2013), 31, at 40; Wilder and Fitz-Gerald, supra note 76, at 295–7.

95 D. van der Weerd, ‘CERUPT and ERUPT Contracts’, in D. Freestone and C. Streck (eds.), Legal Aspects of Implementing the Kyoto Protocol Mechanisms (2005).

96 European Commission, ‘EU Emissions Trading System (EU ETS)’, available at www.ec.europa.eu/clima/policies/ets_en.

97 Freestone, supra note 59, at 176–8. For a review of REDD+ practices see Tehan et al., supra note 6.

98 Wilder and Fitz-Gerald, supra note 76, at 298–304.

99 Ibid., at 300.

100 Klijn, Gupta and Nijboer, supra note 94, at 175–8.

101 Ibid., at 177.

102 Ibid.; Inter-American Investment Corporation, ‘At the Carbon Expo in Germany IIC Launches a New Open-Source Agreement for the Sale and Purchase of Carbon Credits’, available at www.iic.org/en/media/news/carbon-expo-germany-iic-launches-new-open-source-agreement-sale-and-purchase-carbon#.XKagmJgzaUk.

103 See, e.g., World Bank, State and Trends of the Carbon Market (2009); World Bank, State and Trends of the Carbon Market (2010); World Bank, State and Trends of the Carbon Market (2011); World Bank, Mapping Carbon Pricing Initiatives (2013).

104 Interview 11 (September 2016); Interview 12 (September 2016).

105 Paris Agreement, Art. 6.

106 Interview 16 (October 2016).

107 S. Duyck, ‘The Paris Agreement and the Protection of Human Rights in a Changing Climate’, (2015) 26 YIEL 3, at 30–1.

108 See, e.g., J. Schade and W. Obergassel, ‘Human Rights and the Clean Development Mechanism’, (2014) 27 CRIA 717; Duyck, ibid.; J. Dehm, ‘Indigenous Peoples and REDD+ Safeguards: Rights as Resistance or as Disciplinary Inclusion in the Green Economy?’, (2016) 7 JHRE 170.

109 Bodansky, Brunnée and Rajamani, supra note 1, at 93.

110 Ibid., at 299–300.

111 The Convention’s dispute resolution mechanism applies to parties: FCCC, Art. 14.

112 A. Schapper, ‘Local Rights Claims in International Climate Negotiations: Transnational Human Rights Networks at the Climate Conferences’, in S. Duyck, S. Jodoin and A. Johl (eds.), Routledge Handbook of Human Rights and Climate Governance (2018); M. Mueller, ‘Climate Change and Human Rights: Agenda-Setting Against the Odds’, (2017) UCL Global Governance Institute Working Paper Series No. 2017/01.

113 A. Schapper and M. Lederer, ‘Introduction: Human Rights and Climate Change Mapping Institutional Inter-Linkages’, (2014) 27 CRIA 666; A. Savaresi, ‘Climate Change and Human Rights: Fragmentation, Interplay and Institutional Linkages’, in Duyck, Jodoin and Johl, supra note 112.

114 Interview 16 (October 2016).

115 For a history of state submissions see L. Rajamani, ‘The Increasing Currency and Relevance of Rights-Based Perspectives in the International Negotiation on Climate Change’, (2010) 22 JEL 391.

116 The US has been opposed to any right to development more generally: Bodansky, Brunnée and Rajamani, supra note 1, at 129, 310.

117 Ibid.

118 Ibid.

119 Johns, supra note 2, at 23.

120 M. Goodale, ‘Introduction: Locating Rights, Envisioning Law between the Global and the Local’, in M. Goodale and S. E. Merry, The Practice of Human Rights: Tracking Law between the Global and the Local (2007), 1 at 3–4, 10, 22.

121 Merry, S. E., ‘Transnational Human Rights and Local Activism: Mapping the Middle’, (2006) 108 American Anthropologist 38 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

122 Ibid.; Goodale, supra note 120, at 22–4.

123 There is abundant literature addressing human rights and climate change on which this section draws, but only some examines practices and alludes to public advocacy centres. For general sources see Savaresi, supra note 113; Duyck, Jodoin and Johl, supra note 112; Bodansky et al., supra note 1, at 296–313; J. Knox, ‘Linking Human Rights and Climate Change at the United Nations’, 33 (2009) HELR 477; T. Koivurova, S. Duyck and L. Heinämäki, ‘Climate Change and Human Rights’, in K. Kulovesi and M. Mehling (eds.), Climate Change and the Law (2013); Rajamani, supra note 115.

124 Knox, ibid., at 483. See also Schapper, supra note 112, at 50–3 (for a detailed analysis of boomerang strategies, characterized somewhat differently here); M. Keck and K. Sikkink, Activists beyond Borders: Advocacy Networks in International Politics (1998) (coining the term in the context of human rights networks).

125 Petition to the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights Seeking Relief from Violations Resulting from Global Warming Caused by Acts and Omissions of the United States, No. P-1413-05 (7 December 2005).

126 S. Watt-Cloutier, The Right to Be Cold: One Woman’s Fight to Protect the Arctic and Save the Planet from Climate Change (2015), 222–3.

127 J. Cassel, ‘Enforcing Environmental Human Rights: Selected Strategies of US NGOs’, (2007) 6 NJIHR 104; E. Gertz, ‘Inuit Fight Climate Change with Human-Rights Claim against US’, 26 July 2005, Grist, available at www.grist.org/article/gertz-inuit/; Goldberg, D. and Wagner, M., ‘Human Rights Litigation to Protect the Peoples of the Arctic’, (2004) 98 ASIL Proceedings 227 Google Scholar.

128 Watt-Cloutier, supra note 126, at 222–3.

129 Cassel, supra note 127, at 114–17

130 Watt-Cloutier, supra note 126, at 224.

131 Cassel, supra note 127, at 116.

132 Ibid.

133 Watt-Cloutier, supra note 126, at 227–8.

134 Ibid., at 237.

135 Letter from Assistant Executive Secretary, Organization of American States, to Legal Representative for Sheila Watt-Cloutier et al., Petition No. P-1413-05 (16 Nov 2006).

136 H. Osofsky, ‘The Inuit Petition as a Bridge? Beyond Dialectics of Climate Change and Indigenous Peoples’ Rights’, in W. Burns and H. Osofsky (eds.), Adjudicating Climate Change: State, National and International Approaches (2009), 272.

137 Knox, supra note 123, at 482; UCL Global Governance Institute, ‘The UN Special Rapporteur’s Perspective on Agenda-Setting in Climate Change and Human Rights: Interview with John H. Knox’, 16 February 2016, available at www.ucl.ac.uk/global-governance/ggi-interviews/interview-john-knox.

138 D. Macgraw and K. Wienhofer, ‘The Malé Formulation of the Overarching Environmental Human Right’, in J. Knox and R. Pejan (eds.), The Human Right to a Healthy Environment (2018), 215, at 221.

139 Ibid.; Malé Declaration on the Human Dimension of Global Climate Change (14 November 2007).

140 Knox, supra note 123, at 482–3; FCCC, Bali Action Plan, Decision 1/CP.13, FCCC/CP/2007/6/Add.1 (2008), para. 1.

141 Human Rights Council, ‘Human Rights and Climate Change’, UN Doc. A/HRC/RES/7/23 (2008); Report of the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights on the Relationship between Climate Change and Human Rights, UN Doc. A/HRC/10/61 (2009).

142 A list of activities and documents is available at the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, ‘Climate Change’, available at www.ohchr.org/EN/Issues/Environment/SREnvironment/Pages/ClimateChange.aspx.

143 Human Rights Council, ‘Human Rights and the Environment’, UN Doc. A/HRC/RES/19/10 (2012).

144 UCL Global Governance Institute, supra note 137.

145 Ibid.

146 See supra note 141.

147 Schapper, supra note 112.

148 Ibid., at 46–7; FCCC, supra note 63, preambular recital 7, para. 8.

149 Schapper, ibid.; FCCC, supra note 63, Appendix 1.

150 See, e.g., Schapper, ibid.

151 Eslava and Pahuja, supra note 5, at 213.

152 For a detailed interpretation of the preambular recital see L. Rajamani, ‘Human Rights in the Climate Change Regime: From Rio to Paris and Beyond’, in J. Knox and R. Pejan (eds.), supra note 138, 236, at 245–7.

153 CIEL also assisted with the petition: In re Greenpeace Southeast Asia et al., Philippines Commission on Human Rights, Case No. CHR-NI-2016-0001.

154 Client Earth, Amicus Brief: Philippines Commission on Human Rights, Case No. CHR-NI-2016-0001 (2016); Joint Summary of the Amicus Curiae: Philippines Commission on Human Rights, Case No. CHR-NI-2016-0001 (2018).

155 See, e.g., ENvironnemnet JEUnesse v. Attorney General of Canada, Motion for Authorization to Institute a Class Action, No. 500-06 (filed 26 November 2018).

156 Although pleadings do not consistently draw on ‘human’ rights, but also rights under constitutions and private law see, e.g. J. Peel and H. Osofsky, ‘A Rights Turn in Climate Change Litigation’, (2018) 7 TEL 37.

157 Interview 6 (March 2017); Interview 16 (October 2016); Interview 19 (October 2016); Interview 8 (September 2016).

158 Institute for Governance and Sustainable Development, ‘The Center for Climate Integrity’, available at www.igsd.org/initiatives/the-center-for-climate-integrity/.

159 See, e.g., Rules, Modalities and Procedures for the Mechanism Established by Art. 6, para. 4 of the Paris Agreement, Submission by Sabin Center for Climate Change Law, Columbia Law School (2016).

160 See, e.g., UN-REDD Programme, UN-REDD Support and Country Examples on Legal Preparedness for REDD+ (2014).

161 International Bar Association, Achieving Justice and Human Rights in an Era of Climate Disruption (2014).

162 Interview 21 (July 2017); Interview 3 (August 2016).

163 On role splitting see O. Schachter, ‘The Invisible College of International Lawyers’, (1977) 72 NULR 217.

164 M. Darby, ‘Fiji Climate Lead Challenged Consultants’ Influence before Losing Job’, Climate Home News, 6 March 2018, available at www.climatechangenews.com/2018/03/06/fiji-climate-lead-lost-job-challenging-consultants-influence/.

165 See, e.g., A. Roberts, Is International Law International? (2017).

166 I thank an anonymous reviewer for suggesting lawyering practices may exhibit Bourdieu’s notion of structural homology, whereby the apparently shared predilections and behaviours of different social classes reproduce hierarchies that those commonalities supposedly transcend. An account from the Director of Environmental Affairs at the World Bank during early international environmental negotiations is perhaps illustrative. Referring to the ‘population-poverty-environment nexus’, which creates a ‘pessimistic’ dilemma for the future, he explains, ‘The notion of sustainable development gained currency in the late 1980s as the philosopher’s stone which would enable practitioners of development economics to resolve [this dilemma] … It is important when considering the role of the development institutions to note that while industrial countries were to display a more vigorous form of “green politics” over this period, there was nevertheless a world-wide progression in the acceptance (and acceptability) of environment as a serious factor in economic planning and administrative practice. So the developing countries which borrow from the World Bank have been part of the overall trend, although they may have moved more slowly (at least to begin with) and they do have a different agenda.’ See Kenneth Piddington, ‘The Role of the World Bank’, in A. Hurrell and B. Kingsbury (eds.), The International Politics of the Environment: Actors, Interests, and Institutions (1992), 212–13.

167 See, e.g., S. Pahuja, ‘Global Poverty and the Politics of Good Intentions’, in R. Buchanan and P. Zumbansen (eds.), Law in Transition: Human Rights, Development and Transitional Justice (2014).

168 On the ‘ambivalences and contradictions’ of human rights practices, including how human rights may be ‘a tool of strategy and mobilization for oppressed groups’, while also re-enacting statist and market-oriented practices relating to development see B. Rajagopal, International Law from Below: Development, Social Movements, and Third World Resistance (2003).

169 P. Newell and M. Paterson, Climate Capitalism: Global Warming and the Transformation of the Global Economy (2010).

170 See generally Rajamani, supra note 25.

171 See supra note 57.

172 The Convention also enshrines principles relating to an ‘open international economic system’, ‘economic growth’, and ‘sustainable development’: FCCC, Art. 3.

173 Despite this acknowledgment, scholars still generally argue that regulatory cohesion should be promoted where possible.

174 See, e.g., van Asselt, H., Sindico, F. and Mehling, M., ‘Global Climate Change and the Fragmentation of International Law’, (2008) 30 Law & Policy 423 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; M. Young, ‘Climate Change Law and Regime Interaction’, (2011) 1 CCLR 147; Study Group of the International Law Commission, Report on the Fragmentation of International Law: Difficulties Arising from the Diversification and Expansion of International Law, UN Doc. A/CN.4/L.682 (2006).

175 For examples in the legal discipline see, e.g., Young, ibid.; van Asselt et al., ibid.; J. Peel, L. Godden and R. Keenan, ‘Climate Change Law in an Era of Multi-Level Governance’, (2012) 1 TEL 245; Boyd, supra note 6; T. Etty et al., ‘Transnational Climate Law’, (2018) 7 TEL 191; Bodansky, Brunnée and Rajamani, supra note 1, at 258–94; S. Humphreys, ‘Climate Change: Too Complex for a Special Regime’, (2016) JENRL 51.

176 A. Orford, ‘In Praise of Description’, (2012) 25 LJIL 609, at 617–18, citing respectively M. Foucault, ‘La philosophie analytique de la politique’, in D. Defert and F. Ewald (eds.), with J. Lagrange, Dits et ecrits, 1954-1988 (1994), Vol. 3, 540–1; L. Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations (1958), 47. See also Eslava and Pahuja, supra note 5, 218 (on ‘legal-ethnography’); Johns, supra note 2, at 21–3 (on ‘quasi-ethnography’).

177 For examples of diverse practice approaches to international law see Sullivan, G., ‘“Taking on the Technicalities” of International Law – Practice, Description, Critique: A Response to Fleur Johns’, (2017) 111 AJIL Unbound 181 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Eslava and Pahuja, supra note 5; A. Riles, Collateral Knowledge: Legal Reasoning in the Global Financial Markets (2011); Johns, supra note 2; Brunnée and Toope, supra note 2; F. Mégret ‘Practices of Stigmatization’, (2013) 76 LCP 287; Y. Dezalay and B. Garth, Dealing in Virtue: International Commercial Arbitration and the Construction of a Transnational Legal Order (1996); Rajkovic, Aalberts and Gammeltoft-Hansen, supra note 7; Goodale, supra note 120.

178 For example, Hilary Charlesworth exhorts us to turn away from discourses about recurrent crises toward examining how structural injustices are reproduced in everyday life: H. Charlesworth, ‘International Law: A Discipline of Crisis’, (2002) 65 MLR 377. See also Orford, supra note 176. For one example of histories of international law that foreground practices see Anghie’s account of positivist techniques in Anghie, supra note 64.

179 Eslava and Pahuja, supra note 5, at 202–3, 214–15; E. Adler and V. Pouliot (eds.), International Practices (2011).

180 Johns, supra note 2, at 23.

181 See F. Johns, ‘Data, Detection, and the Redistribution of the Sensible in International Law’, (2017) 111 AJIL 57; A. Riles, ‘The Anti-Network: Private Global Governance, Legal Knowledge, and the Legitimacy of the State’, (2008) 56 AJCL 605. On material agency see Hohmann and Joyce, supra note 87.

182 K. Khoday and U. Natarajan, ‘Locating Nature: Making and Unmaking International Law’, (2014) 27 LJIL 573, at 586.

183 See, e.g., B. Latour, Reassembling the Social: an Introduction to Actor-Network Theory (2005) (on rejecting the divide between material and social), 75–6; Rajkovic, Aalberts and Gammeltoft-Hansen, supra note 7, at 13 (on refusing axiomatic juxtapositions); Anghie, supra note 64 (on the disciplinary construction of the natural and the positive, and the international and national); Riles, supra note 181 (on sets of institutions, actors, doctrines, ideas and documents as sets of knowledge practices); Eslava and Pahuja, supra note 5 (on the ideational and material, and theory and practice); Adler and Pouliot, supra note 179.

184 Eslava and Pahuja, supra note 5, at 220; Concerning the reconstruction of flat ontologies using concepts such as ‘assemblages’, ‘actor-networks’, ‘fields’, ‘communities’, see C. Bueger and F. Gadinger, International Practice Theory (2018), 106–10.

185 Natarajan, U., Reynolds, J., Bhatia, A. and Xavier, S., ‘Introduction: TWAIL – on Praxis and the Intellectual’, (2016) 37 Third World Quarterly 1946 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

186 E. Fisher, E. Scotford and E. Barritt, ‘The Legally Disruptive Nature of Climate Change’, (2017) 80 MLR 173.