There are two general pathways towards climate change litigation in China: tort-based litigation to hold carbon emitters accountable in civil law, and administrative litigation against the government to demand better climate regulation. While the first pathway is gaining momentum among Chinese scholars, this article argues that legal barriers to applying tort-based rules to climate change should be fairly acknowledged. The article argues that China's legal framework for environmental impact assessment (EIA) provides more openness and flexibility for the resolution of climate change disputes. Therefore, EIA-based climate lawsuits, which challenge environmental authorities for not adequately taking climate change factors into account in decision-making processes, encounter relatively fewer legal barriers, require less radical legal or institutional reform, and have greater potential to maintain existing legal orders. The regulatory effects produced by EIA-based litigation suggest that the scholarship on climate change litigation in China should take such litigation seriously because it could influence both governments and emitters in undertaking more proactive efforts. This China-based study, with a special focus on judicial practice in the largest developing country, will shine a light on China's contribution to transnational climate litigation.

Environmental public interest litigation (EPIL) by non-governmental organizations (NGOs) emerged in China over the last decade amidst the growing focus on environmental issues and the increasing political need to bring greater public participation to the area. This article examines the current practice of EPIL by NGOs in order to understand the potential flaws and deficiencies of NGO participation in this relatively new field of environmental litigation. The article sets out by exploring EPIL as a legal pathway for the public to become involved in China's environmental governance. It then analyzes the legal provision of environmental litigation in China before critically examining several instances of EPIL initiated by NGOs between 2015 and 2019. The article finds that NGOs show weaknesses in their current EPIL practice, including in case selection and litigation risk assessment, but are willing to test and potentially expand the scope of EPIL into new areas of environmental protection such as noise pollution and renewable energy. It concludes that these weaknesses and strengths of NGO involvement in EPIL reflect the constantly evolving landscape of environmental governance and environmental litigation in China.

A study of the rights regime for environmental protection in India indicates that such protections overlap with constitutional rights guaranteed primarily to citizens or persons under the law. Contemporary jurisprudence has aggressively developed this intersectionality, declaring natural entities to be living persons with fundamental rights analogous to those of human beings. This article explores the role played by two judgments delivered by the Uttarakhand High Court – Mohammed Salim v. State of Uttarakhand and Lalit Miglani v. State of Uttarakhand – in the establishment of an effective framework for environmental protection. This is effectuated in both cases by assigning legal personality to rivers and articulating a conceptual shift from the human-centric approach. Accounting for the socio-cultural and spiritual relationships that have received legal protection, this article critically analyzes the judgments, their rationale and contributions to environmental protection. As the judgments articulate a paradigm shift in environmental protection, their effectiveness is best assessed through analyzing the frameworks created for their implementation. While the pronouncement of the Indian courts on the legal personality of rivers is an encouraging paradigm shift in environmental commitment, establishing the rights of nature was undertaken without due attention to the complexities that characterize the Indian socio-politico-religious context and to the legal consequences of bestowing vaguely contoured rights upon natural entities.

While the intergovernmental climate regime increasingly recognizes the role of non-state actors in achieving the goals of the Paris Agreement (PA), the normative linkages between the intergovernmental climate regime and the non-state dominated ‘transnational partnership governance’ remain vague and tentative. A formalized engagement of the intergovernmental climate regime with transnational partnerships can increase the effectiveness of partnerships in delivering on climate mitigation and adaptation, thereby complementing rather than replacing government action. The proposed active engagement with partnerships would include (i) collecting and analyzing information to develop and prioritize areas for transnational and partnership engagement; (ii) defining minimum criteria and procedural requirements to be listed on an enhanced Non-state Actor Zone for Climate Action platform; (iii) actively supporting strategic initiatives; (iv) facilitating market or non-market finance as part of Article 6 PA; and (v) evaluating the effectiveness of partnerships in the context of the enhanced transparency framework (Article 13 PA) and the global stocktake (Article 14 PA). The UNFCCC Secretariat could facilitate engagement and problem solving by actively orchestrating transnational partnerships. Constructing effective implementation partnerships, recording their mitigation and adaptation goals, and holding them accountable may help to move climate talks from rhetoric to action.

This article examines the creation of the International Solar Alliance (ISA), a new international organization led by India and backed primarily by developing countries. Official documents and wide-ranging interviews offer insights into the treaty-making process. Using a political economy approach to the study of international law, the article analyzes politico-legal issues associated with the creation of the ISA. The legal form of the ISA is best described as ‘soft law in a hard shell’: it uses the legal infrastructure of a treaty while relying on the social structure of participating actors for its future implementation. Empirical evidence suggests that three factors explain the treaty structure of the ISA: India's leadership role in the treaty-making process, the early involvement of non-state actors, and the preference of developing countries for legal form. Ultimately, the case illustrates India's shift towards a leadership role in climate change governance, and the steady emergence of non-state actors in driving climate action.

Global common concerns – including combating illegal, unreported and unregulated (IUU) fishing – necessitate effective global action to avoid displacing illegal practices to under-regulated jurisdictions. The response in international law has therefore included the obligation upon all states to exercise jurisdiction, albeit with varying clarity regarding the existence and scope of duties for each jurisdictional basis. This article argues that, through its non-cooperating third country identification procedure, the European Union (EU) has sought unilaterally to crystalize and promote the implementation of an obligation upon states to exercise extraterritorial active personality-based jurisdiction over their own nationals engaged in IUU fishing. This is demonstrated through an analysis of EU practice relating to Asian states and remains true despite the EU's non-cooperating third country identification procedure only formally targeting flag, port, coastal, and market states. The EU and Asian states have improved their laws governing nationals engaged in IUU fishing, but concerns over legal certainty arise.