Climate Litigation in the Global South: Constraints and Innovations
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract Cases involving climate change have been litigated in the courts for some time, but new directions and trends have started to emerge. While the majority of climate litigation has occurred in the United States and other developed countries, cases in the Global South are growing both in terms of quantity and in the quality of their strategies and regulatory outcomes. However, so far climate litigation in the Global South has received scant attention from the literature. We argue that climate litigation in the Global South opens up avenues for progress in addressing climate change in highly vulnerable countries. We first highlight some of the capacity constraints experienced in Global South countries to provide context for the emerging trend of strategic climate litigation in the area. In spite of significant constraints experienced, the strategies adopted by litigants push the climate litigation agenda forward as a result of their outward-looking objective of combating ongoing environmental degradation, and, on a doctrinal level, the way in which they link climate change and human rights. Bearing in mind the limitations resulting from the selective nature of the cases examined, we draw upon Legal Opportunity Structures (LOS) approaches and identify two reasons for innovative cases and outcomes in Global South strategic climate litigation: (i) how litigants are either overcoming or using procedural requirements for access to environmental justice, and (ii) the existence of progressive legislative and judicial approaches to climate change. The strategies and outcomes from these judicial approaches in the Global South might be able to contribute to the further development of transnational climate change litigation.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.015 | 0.029 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.006 | 0.021 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.014 | 0.007 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.012 |
| Research integrity | 0.005 | 0.006 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.008 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".