Decolonial Climate Litigation

This article identifies and analyzes a select body of climate litigation, framing such litigation as a decolonial approach to legal mobilization. Drawing on 58 cases filed between 2003 and 2023, we examine how certain climate lawsuits – spanning diverse jurisdictions, legal claims, and forums – articulate political projects grounded in historical struggles against colonialism, racial capitalism, and extractivism. Instead of adopting conventional typologies based on rights, torts or procedural elements, we propose a political lens attentive to the subaltern voices, contexts, and narratives that animate these cases. We identify commonalities across this litigation: racialized plaintiffs, three contexts of decolonial struggle (settler colonies, metropoles/(post)colonies, and global peripheries), and four distinctive types of decolonial claim. While these cases remain partially entangled with liberal legal frameworks, they nonetheless contest dominant climate governance paradigms and advance emancipatory visions of justice. We argue that these cases represent a tactical, albeit imperfect, intervention in the struggle for decolonial climate justice.