Central bank mandates have evolved with time beyond price stability and economic growth objectives to include financial stability, financial inclusion, and, more recently, climate change in some jurisdictions. This chapter analyses the potential role of central banks in dealing with increasingly significant climate risk. Existing literature suggests that physical and transition risks from climate change are key risks to macroeconomic and financial stability. The chapter argues that central banks should, therefore, at a minimum, incorporate climate risk in their macroeconomic and financial stability risk assessments to determine appropriate policy and regulatory tools for addressing them within the boundaries of existing mandates and underpinned by a transparent framework of decision-making and accountability. Central banks should avoid mission creep by remaining focused on achieving clear statutory objectives, while at the same time avoiding possible legal and credibility risks from doing nothing or too little, too late. The chapter further argues that central banks in emerging and developing economies face peculiar challenges in assessing the dynamics of climate risk, estimating potential impacts, and calibrating tools to address potential impacts on price or financial stability. It concludes by recognising progress at the international level and calls for additional guidance, particularly for central banks in emerging and developing economies, to help design proportional and effective central bank policy and regulatory measures to help contain significant climate risks they face.

This chapter places labor lawyers center stage, examining their role in advancing labor rights litigation at the ECtHR. The analysis shows how ideologically driven lawyers – often working with limited resources – led international litigation efforts on behalf of unions in the UK and Turkey. Drawing on interviews and case law analysis, it traces how these lawyers identified the ECtHR as a viable target within a broader landscape of international legal institutions and crafted litigation strategies. The chapter conceptualizes this process across three phases: an initial probing phase in the 1990s, marked by uncertainty and experimentation; an expansion phase in the 2000s as the ECtHR signaled growing receptiveness to labor rights; and a post-2010 backlash phase, during which the Court’s authority came under strain. By tracing these developments, the chapter underscores how lawyers bridged local struggles and international legal arenas, expanding the scope of human rights protections while adapting litigation strategies to shifting political constraints at home.

Proposals for deploying monetary policy to fight climate change and reduce inequality rely on the use of the nation state’s monetary authority to allocate capital to different parts of the economy. Against those proposals stands the publicly stated commitments of central bankers to avoid ‘allocating credit’ by implementing ‘market-neutral’ policies. A review of the financial empirics of central banks’ market operations shows a historically consistent pattern of using monetary authority to allocate debt and equity capital to different sectors of the economy at critical moments. Legal frameworks impose no effective constraints on that state-guidance of investment and, when necessary, the law of central banking actively facilitates capital allocation in ways that allow policymakers to fight deflation, provide emergency fiscal support, and rescue crisis-stricken parts of the financial sector. Against those empirics, commitments to avoid capital allocation appear as communication strategies rather than descriptions of the reality of central bank operations. Given the position of central banks as statutory public agencies, this creates various types of constitutional problems, notably concerning the protection of liberal property rights from government interference. Understanding these legal, market, and political dynamics provides a principled basis to debate reform proposals regarding the constitutional status and institutional functions of central banks in market economies responding to climate change and destructive inequality.

The first chapter traces the establishment of British authority (1899–1911). As the provisions of the treaties were key legal documents, I show how the Tengyue consuls understood the rights of British and Chinese smugglers in two key transfrontier trades: salt and opium. The movement of illicit goods was integral for the frontier economy and local populations. Tengyue consuls reimagined consular rights based on their understanding of these local considerations and imperial policy. The chapter explores two key smuggling cases to show how consuls were mediators amongst a number of different British colonial and consular authorities in London, India, Burma and China on legal rights. The chapter is therefore concerned with how consuls understood the overlapping frameworks and tensions of different layers of law: Sino-British treaties, Burmese territorial law and extraterritoriality

This chapter adopts a state-centered approach to compliance by examining how the Turkish and UK governments responded to ECtHR rulings on trade union rights. While both states enacted structural reforms to align with ECtHR judgments, the chapter shows that, upon closer inspection, these measures often prove partial and superficial. In Turkey, persistent strike bans, a collective bargaining system that privileges a government-aligned union, and violent repression of union activity indicate deep structural resistance to labor rights. In the UK, compliance took the form of narrow legal adjustments that reflect an instrumental approach rather than an absence of legal capacity. When evaluated solely by formal state responses, ECtHR rulings offer limited leverage for meaningful reform, confirming the pessimism of realist and critical scholars. Yet the chapter also shows that some of the most effective changes occurred before the Court issued its final ruling, suggesting that international law gains traction when combined with grassroots mobilization. In highlighting the limitations of a compliance-oriented perspective, the chapter sets the stage for the next two chapters, which explore how labor activists engage international human rights law not merely as a legal tool, but as part of broader campaigns for justice, recognition, and institutional change.

The sixth chapter traces the decline of British jurisdiction in the province (1917–39). The Chinese authorities in Xinjiang challenged British consular rights and consuls responded by managing this erosion of their powers. Consuls based their approach to managing this decline on the needs of the British community living in Xinjiang, as well as on practical and political considerations. The chapter ends by showing how the trading community that moved between India and Xinjiang declined rapidly and thereafter ended consular rights in the province.

This chapter explores the impacts of the Mono Lake case beyond Mono Lake. Its embrace of public trust principles quickly rippled through the California legal system, and then others. The case was cited in state and federal courts. The influence of the decision was felt in legislative, administrative, and even constitutional matters. It drew praise from many scholars but also criticism by property rights advocates, those worried about the constitutional separation of powers, and even environmentalists concerned about the intrusion of property concepts into stewardship. The chapter explores the journey of the Mono Lake doctrine through California and beyond, with special focus on the contrasting paths taken in two neighboring states, Nevada and Idaho. In California, a case protecting the Scott River extended the Mono Lake doctrine to cover even groundwater tributaries of navigable trust resources. Idaho, fearful of the burdens of environmental protection prioritized in California, rejected the majority view of the doctrine as a quasi-constitutional constraint. Nevada, already bound by a quasi-constitutional trust, sought a different approach to preserve appropriative water rights.

Central banks around the world are increasingly shaping, as well as following, broader climate policies, a development we theorize as policy coordination. In this chapter, we study how and why the European Central Bank (ECB), previously narrowly focused on its primary objective of price stability, has moved towards more extensive coordination with the political institutions of the EU. Based on an analysis of actual policies and views held by ECB top officials, we trace the evolution of the practice and ideological backing of ECB coordination with fiscal and climate policies. Our findings document an interesting paradox: although the ECB has increasingly engaged in policy coordination, it has done so on a unilateral basis by choosing on its own whether, when, and with which economic policies it coordinates monetary policy. We refer to this practice as “independent policy coordination”. Analysed against recent case law by the Court of Justice of the European Union, the legal limits to independent policy coordination are only vaguely defined. As it is notoriously difficult to distinguish independent policy coordination from autonomous policymaking by the ECB, we conclude that multilateral coordination, to the extent it remains compatible with the primacy of price stability, would be the next logical step.

This chapter traces the ECtHR’s growing authority and legitimacy in the post-1990 era to explain how it emerged as a new legal venue for workers marginalized by domestic neoliberal restructuring. Based on original data compiled in StrasLab, a comprehensive database of ECtHR labor cases, the chapter offers a systematic account of how labor rights claims have gained ground within the Court’s evolving jurisprudence. It analyzes how the Court’s interpretation of key Convention provisions gradually expanded to cover a wide range of issues, including dismissals, wage cuts, surveillance, discrimination, forced labor, workers’ health and safety, and trade union rights. Zooming in on trade union rights, the chapter identifies three temporal shifts in the Court’s jurisprudence. During the initial period, the ECtHR largely adhered to a narrow reading of labor rights and rejected most claims. This was followed by the golden years for trade unions at the ECtHR, when the Court significantly expanded protections under Article 11 and issued groundbreaking rulings advancing trade union rights. In recent years, however, mounting political backlash has led to a more cautious posture: while the Court has refrained from rolling back existing protections, it has hesitated to extend them further.

Some forty years after the aqueduct first began tapping the Owens Valley, L.A. leaders realized that the city needed still more water. They also realized that there was a wealth of unappropriated water in the next watershed up, just 200 miles further north – the Mono Lake Basin. This chapter explores the extension of the aqueduct to the Mono Basin in 1940 and the acceleration of Mono exports after the second barrel was built in 1970. It begins by introducing the extraordinary features of the Mono Lake ecosystem itself – the trillions of brine shrimp, clouds of alkali flies, and millions of migratory birds that depend on a hypersaline sea – suspended in a high-desert basin marked by dormant volcanism, geothermal activity, and limestone tufa towers rising from calcium laden springs entering Mono’s carbonate-rich waters. It also reviews the human communities of the Basin, including the indigenous Kutzadika’a Paiute and the European settlement that followed the California Gold Rush. Finally, it explores the human and environmental consequences that followed Los Angeles’s acquisition of rights to take water from the Basin, setting the stage for the legal controversy that would follow.

The role of central banks has always evolved in response to political and economic events. In 2015, when the UN Agenda 2030 and the Paris Agreement were signed, awareness of the importance of climate change and other sustainability risks for their mandates began to grow in the central banking community. Physical risks and transition risks can act as powerful channels impacting banks’ businesses and balance sheets and the economy more broadly, affecting both price and financial stability. Laying the analytical groundwork for the following chapters of the book, this chapter embeds their recent concern for sustainability risks and policies in the dynamic role central banks have played historically. It also discusses how central banks have coordinated their policies internationally, such as through the Network for Greening the Financial System and the Financial Stability Board. While climate change and climate-related risks have been dominating these policies, central banks have started shifting their attention also towards other aspects of environmental sustainability, including biodiversity loss. Aspects of social sustainability have received significantly less attention in central banking policy circles. However, the potentially dis-equalizing side effects of extended periods of quantitative easing have fostered central banks’ interest in the inequality dynamics of monetary policy.