1. Introduction
In November 2025, the 30th Conference of the Parties (COP) to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC)Footnote 1 convened at the edge of the Amazon rainforest in Belém (Brazil), the same country that hosted the famous Rio Earth Summit of 1992.Footnote 2 Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva dubbed the 2025 event the ‘COP of truth’,Footnote 3 and delegates had no choice but to confront a number of stark realities: 2024 was the warmest year on record, at approximately 1.55°C above pre-industrial levels; more than one-third of the parties to the Paris Agreement had failed to submit their nationally determined contributions, and the contributions that were submitted fall well short of what is necessary to achieve the objectives of the Paris Agreement.Footnote 4 The Mutirão Decision, which takes its name from an Indigenous word for collective mobilization, acknowledges the uncomfortable truth that ‘the carbon budget consistent with achieving the Paris Agreement’s temperature goal is now small and being rapidly depleted’.Footnote 5 COP30 also revealed profound divides about the proper role of multilateral institutions in facilitating climate action, and proposals on phasing out fossil fuel and halting deforestation failed to secure consensus.Footnote 6
The articles in this issue illuminate the institutional, doctrinal, and normative challenges that transnational environmental law must navigate. We have contributions on biotechnology governance under the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD),Footnote 7 on democratic deficits in trade–environmental policymaking, on groundwater ownership regimes, on the colonial legacies that are embedded in European Union (EU) deforestation regulation, on corporate defence strategies in climate litigation, on new remedies and environmental harms, on innovative legal concepts, such as ‘solastalgia’, and on lacunae in the regulation of light pollution. All these contributions acknowledge that our field is grappling with fundamental questions about effectiveness, legitimacy, accountability, and justice, which resonate powerfully with the debates that animated COP30.
2. The Delegalization Turn and Its Implications for Climate–Biodiversity Governance
This issue opens with a contribution from Elsa Tsioumani and Florian Rabitz.Footnote 8 Tsioumani and Rabitz document a troubling pattern of delegalization in international biotechnology governance, which is orchestrated under the CBD. The authors analyze decisions that were adopted at the 15th and 16th CBD COP, and they show that policy has become less exacting in substance, as well as losing much of its procedural institutionalization. These propositions hold true for three critical agenda items: digital sequence information for genetic resources, risk assessment for living modified organisms, and synthetic biology. The findings of the authors stand in stark contrast to the history of the CBD as an international forum which manages the interface between biotechnology and biodiversity. It produced three legally binding protocols for different points of the bio-innovation value chain between 2000 and 2010.Footnote 9
The UNFCCC COP30 in Belém showed that the parties are increasingly struggling to agree on matters of substance. What they do instead is to initiate roadmaps, dialogues, and work programmes, which defer difficult decisions.Footnote 10 The Mutirão Decision thus does not include provisions on the phase-out of fossil fuels or on deforestation, despite wide support for both. These omissions are symptomatic of the same reluctance to assume legally binding obligations to which Tsioumani and Rabitz refer in the setting of the CBD. When UNFCCC COP30 President André Corrêa do Lago announced the creation of two roadmaps, one on transitioning away from fossil fuels and another on halting and reversing deforestation, he effectively admitted that the formal negotiation process is incapable of producing multilateral consensus.Footnote 11
Tsioumani and Rabitz trace delegalization to changes in the political economy of biotechnology. The seemingly ironclad divide between biotechnology-producing developed countries and precaution-minded developing countries that typified earlier CBD negotiations is a thing of the past now – the major emerging economies have become biotechnology powerhouses, the interests of which differ sharply from those of their negotiating partners.Footnote 12 Brazil, which historically espoused the same position on precaution as most developing countries, now appears to prefer that the CBD retreat from biotechnology governance. The EU, once a champion of precautionary international regulation, is contemplating the deregulation of certain genome-edited crops.Footnote 13 These reorientations, taken in the aggregate, have weakened the coalitions that once drove legalization.
The parallel with the dynamics of UNFCCC COP30 is clear. The Like-Minded Developing Countries assert that they have ‘the highest climate ambition and implementation in this room’, which ‘cannot be said of those who seem to be the most vocal on transitioning away from fossil fuels’.Footnote 14 This truculence attests to the reconfiguration of the negotiating blocs of yore. The insistence of the Arab Group that all text which targets any sector of their economies remain ‘off the table’ shows how economic interests can override environmental commitments within the multilateral process.Footnote 15 As states increasingly distance themselves from binding instruments, doubts begin to mount over the capacity of international environmental law, with its elaborate formal architecture, to remain relevant in an era in which legalization is no longer de rigueur.
3. Democratic Deficits in the Trade-Environment Interface
With Irene Musselli and Claudia Ituarte-Lima’s article ‘Biodiversity, EU Pesticides Law, and Trade: Deconstructing World Trade Organization Delegates’ Concerns through a Human Rights Lens’,Footnote 16 the issue turns to the World Trade Organization (WTO). Musselli and Ituarte-Lima inquire how the concerns that the Latin American countries have voiced against EU restrictions on neonicotinoid pesticide residues reflect deeper structural problems in trade policy positions. Their analysis does not assess the legal merits of these concerns under WTO law but rather interrogates them from the perspective of human rights. What emerges is a profound disconnect between trade policy stances and commitments under the laws of human rights and biodiversity.Footnote 17
The Belém Conference grappled extensively with what developing countries call ‘unilateral trade-restrictive measures’, that is, environmental regulations of importing countries that affect market access for exports.Footnote 18 The African Group proposed a system whereby parties that wish to adopt measures that may affect trade would be required to provide advance notice to the UNFCCC.Footnote 19 The Mutirão Decision reaffirms that ‘measures taken to combat climate change, including unilateral ones, should not constitute a means of arbitrary or unjustifiable discrimination or a disguised restriction on international trade’.Footnote 20 It also provides for a series of events that will take place between now and 2028 and are intended to enhance international cooperation in trade; the WTO is set to participate.Footnote 21
Musselli and Ituarte-Lima hold that ‘the policy debate before the WTO TBT [Technical Barriers to Trade] Committee reflects a democratic deficit in preparing country positions …, leading to systemic bias against public interests and the environmental rule of law’.Footnote 22 Drawing on public choice theory, they argue that trade ministries are usually attuned to a narrow range of sectoral concerns.Footnote 23 Since commercial interests are focused while public interests are diffuse, agribusiness constituencies wind up exercising a disproportionate influence on negotiating positions.Footnote 24 Indigenous peoples, local communities, and biosphere defenders – that is, the very rights-holders whose interests human rights law ought to protect – possess significantly less economic and political power than these corporations.Footnote 25 The implications of this asymmetry for the climate regime are significant. At COP30, organizations representing Indigenous peoples condemned the killing of land defenders and lamented the relegation of Indigenous rights to the preambular paragraphs of the Mutirão Decision.Footnote 26 Environmental non-governmental organizations (NGOs) have been keen to emphasize that ‘the real direction of climate action comes from people-led, community-rooted solutions’,Footnote 27 and that ‘it is the power of the peoples and movements that will deliver the transformation that is needed’.Footnote 28 The structural exclusion of rights-holders from the formulation of trade policy, which Musselli and Ituarte-Lima document extensively, is indicative of a more general pattern in which international environmental governance privileges state actors and economically powerful constituencies over those who suffer the consequence of environmental degradation most immediately.
Musselli and Ituarte-Lima propose procedural innovations that could expand the trade–policy debate about pesticides. These include multi-interest trade delegations, which would be modelled on the International Labour Organization and premised on a requirement that trade delegates speak and act in conformity with pre-agreed biodiversity targets.Footnote 29 These proposals appear to cohere with the mechanisms for stakeholder engagement that were articulated at Belém, including the decision to establish a just transition mechanism, which was hailed as the creation of ‘a dedicated space to consider the rights of workers and trade unions’.Footnote 30
4. Comparative Groundwater Governance and Resource Sovereignty
The article by Gabriel Eckstein, Theo Buchler, Caleb Cook, Heping Dang, Robyn Stein, Stefano Burchi, Gabriela Cuadrado Quesada, Juan Pablo Galeano, Eric Garner, Amy Hardberger, Imad Antoine Ibrahim and Oudi Kgomongwe, ‘Comparison of Groundwater Ownership Regimes in Ten Jurisdictions Across Five Continents’,Footnote 31 is the offshoot of a different type of transnational environmental legal inquiry. They offer a systematic comparative analysis of ownership regimes for domestic groundwater in ten jurisdictions, spread over nine countries and five continents. This pilot study, which was conducted under the auspices of the International Association for Water Law, fills a gaping hole in the literature, in which groundwater ownership frameworks have long been understudied, despite the self-evident gravity of the risks – overextraction, contamination, and climate change, to name but a few – to which groundwater is presently exposed.Footnote 32
The study by Eckstein and co-authors identifies three dominant models of groundwater ownership. Under private ownership, all rights and obligations of ownership are allocated to individuals or juridical persons. For example, in Texas (United States (US)), groundwater is the private property of the owner of the overlying land. Under public ownership, the nation-state or one of its units owns groundwater; this is the case in China, Costa Rica, and Kenya. Finally, under the non-ownership-with-public-oversight model, groundwater cannot be property prior to extraction, and while it remains in that state it is managed by public authorities. The Netherlands and South Africa adhere to this approach.Footnote 33
Water security features prominently in national adaptation plans.Footnote 34 At the UNFCCC COP30 in Belém, adaptation was emphasized alongside mitigation. Adaptation finance from developed countries must now double, and the Mutirão Decision calls for it to triple by 2035.Footnote 35 The comparative analysis of groundwater ownership contains essential information for those who are interested in the ways in which law enables and constrains adaptive water management. The treatment by Eckstein and co-authors of Indigenous, customary, and traditional practices is particularly germane to these ends. Half of the jurisdictions that they review simply do not recognize the practices in question in law;Footnote 36 the other half offer varying degrees of protection. For instance, Chile recognizes ancestral water-use rights that predate the national Water Code and affords them superiority over all other claims of use.Footnote 37 Conversely, in China, traditional practices are acknowledged only at the regional and the local levels.Footnote 38
5. Unilateralism, Historical Responsibility, and the EU Deforestation Regulation
In their article ‘Unravelling the EU Deforestation-Free Products Regulation: A Transnational Governance Mechanism that Misses the Forest for the Trees’,Footnote 39 Ysaline Reid and Tomaso Ferrando develop a critical evaluation of the EU’s Deforestation-Free Products Regulation (EUDR).Footnote 40 They engage directly with one of the unilateral environmental measures that excited such profuse controversy at COP30. The EUDR, adopted in June 2023, requires operators and traders to conduct due diligence and maintain the traceability of cattle, wood, palm oil, soy, cocoa, coffee, rubber, and certain products that are derived from them. Market access can be granted only to commodities that are deforestation-free and produced in compliance with the laws of their countries of origin.Footnote 41
While the Regulation has been celebrated as a milestone in the fight against global deforestation,Footnote 42 Reid and Ferrando argue that it is liable to perpetuate global inequalities.Footnote 43 Drawing on decolonial and unequal exchanges scholarship, they situate the EUDR within historically shaped and unequally constructed agri-food chain.Footnote 44 Unilateral trade measures raise questions about participation and legitimacy, while the Regulation is wholly blind to the historical narrative of unequal development to which it provides another instalment. The narrow approach of the EU to the greening of agri-food chains overlooks the socio-economic, political, and ecological structures of commodity production.Footnote 45
The EU has acknowledged importing a third of all globally traded agricultural products that are associated with deforestation between 1990 and 2008. The EUDR provides a blanket amnesty to all such transgressions provided that they were perpetrated before 31 December 2020. Reid and Ferrando’s critique of this decision dovetails into the debates about common but differentiated responsibilities and respective capabilities. At COP30 in Belém, the Arab Group underlined the importance of the fundamental principles of the UNFCCC,Footnote 46 and the Bolivarian Alliance urged developed countries to meet their financial obligations ‘without double standards’ and to ‘eliminate all’ unilateral trade measures.Footnote 47 The Brazilian Presidency’s initiative of a Tropical Forest Forever Facility financing mechanism,Footnote 48 as well as the announcement of a roadmap to halting and reversing deforestation by 2030, reflects the continued salience of forest governance to climate governance, the failings of the Mutirão Decision notwithstanding.Footnote 49 The Coalition for Rainforest Nations welcomed the roadmap, and it noted that ‘the project-based approach is no longer fit for purpose’, while calling for high-integrity carbon markets for forests with robust safeguards.Footnote 50 The analysis by Reid and Ferrando suggests that the roadmap must also grapple with questions of historical responsibility and participatory legitimacy, which thus far have remained outside the mainstream.
6. Forward-Looking Remedies and the Prevention Paradigm
In their article ‘Guarantees of Non-Repetition and the Future of Transboundary Harm: Lessons Flowing from the Montara Oil Spill’,Footnote 51 Jean Allain and Iman Prihandono advance a new argument about state responsibility in international environmental law. Their principal contention is that states that suffer transboundary environmental harm may find relief in the often-overlooked remedy of guarantees of non-repetition.Footnote 52 The factual background of the article is the 2009 Montara oil spill, an uncontrolled release of crude oil from a wellhead platform on the Australian continental shelf in the Timor Sea. The discharge continued for 75 days and affected an area of 90,000 square kilometres; it wound up causing significant harm to the Indonesian marine environment.Footnote 53 The Australian Commission of Inquiry found that the operator of the platform had not observed sensible oilfield practices and that the Northern Territory Department of Resources had not regulated diligently.Footnote 54 The Federal Court of Australia ultimately approved a class-action settlement whereby Indonesian seaweed farmers would receive US$1.2 billion.Footnote 55 According to Allain and Prihandono, international environmental law should move beyond the traditional restorative model of state responsibility, which relies on ex post facto reparations, and place prevention at the centre of its remedial architecture. This emphasis on prevention accords with the modern tendency to lavish attention on questions of loss and damage, which, in turn, is a response to the incontrovertible proposition that climate impacts are inevitable.
COP30 saw the conclusion of the review of the Warsaw International Mechanism on loss and damage and progress on the Santiago Network for technical assistance.Footnote 56 Still, Allain and Prihandono’s fundamental insight that prevention should inform remedies even after harm has occurred opens possibilities for creative institutional design that remain to be explored fully. The authors propose the International Law Commission’s 2001 Draft Articles on Prevention of Transboundary Harm from Hazardous ActivitiesFootnote 57 as a roadmap for the roll-out of guarantees of non-repetition; this outcome would be likely also to necessitate the establishment of bilateral intergovernmental organizations for continuous monitoring and oversight.Footnote 58 This original approach is in step with the just transition mechanism and the operationalization of the Technology Implementation Programme at COP30,Footnote 59 in that the latter evinces the openness of the parties to expanding the repertory of international environmental law so as to subsume new institutions. This expansion, just like the roll-out of Allain and Prihandono’s proposals, requires the parties to always answer novel questions about coordination, efficiency, and the relationship between institutional proliferation and substantive effectiveness.
7. Corporate Accountability and Climate Litigation After Belém
In ‘Save the Climate but Don’t Blame Us: Corporate Responses in Climate Litigation’,Footnote 60 Noah Walker-Crawford examines the response of fossil fuel corporations to climate litigation. He focuses on scientific evidence and the construction of evidentiary counter-narratives. The article compares four emblematic cases:Footnote 61 Luciano Lliuya v. RWE in Germany,Footnote 62 Milieudefensie v. Shell in the Netherlands,Footnote 63 and the California and Honolulu public nuisance cases against major oil companies in the US.Footnote 64 Walker-Crawford develops a typology that revolves around counter-narratives, substantive challenges to evidentiary quality, and attacks on scientific integrity.Footnote 65
The Belém COP30 explicitly engaged with litigation and multilateral negotiation. The Alliance of Small Island States (AOSIS) and Least Developed Countries welcomed the advisory opinions of the International Tribunal for the Law of the Sea (ITLOS),Footnote 66 the International Court of Justice (ICJ),Footnote 67 and the Inter-American Court of Human Rights (IACtHR),Footnote 68 over the two years that preceded the summit.Footnote 69 AOSIS highlighted the holding of the ICJ that the 1.5°C goal is a legal limit.Footnote 70 Youth NGOs cited the ICJ advisory opinion in calling for shared responsibility for the future.Footnote 71 By and large, litigation shapes multilateral negotiations. As the courts articulate legal obligations for climate change, they create normative reference points that shape negotiating positions and expectations for the conduct of states and corporations.Footnote 72
The corporate defence strategies that Walker-Crawford documents consist of efforts to resist the use of climate science in the allocation of legal accountability. According to the author, fossil fuel companies no longer deny anthropogenic climate change but instead challenge the validity of climate science in establishing legal responsibility.Footnote 73 The defendants in the cases that Walker-Crawford covers all acknowledged that their activities had contributed to global warming and recognized themselves as key players in the energy transition, yet they emphasized the multi-causality of climate change and then leveraged its complexity strategically to escape liability.Footnote 74 There is a very obvious similarity between the counter-narrative strategy that Walker-Crawford identifies, whereby corporations use Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change reports to argue that emissions are driven by population growth, economic activity, and lifestyle choices rather than corporate extraction,Footnote 75 and some of the rhetoric at COP30.
8. Expanding the Frontiers of Environmental Harm: Solastalgia and Psychological Dimensions
Simon Van Eekert’s article ‘Solastalgia: A New Type of Harm for a More Sustainable Environmental Liability Framework’Footnote 76 advocates a significant conceptual innovation. Van Eekert proposes the integration of solastalgia, a psychological condition whereby the individual experiences distress as a result of changes to a familiar environment which they perceive negatively – into the legal frameworks that govern environmental harm in Belgium and the Netherlands. This interdisciplinary analysis bridges environmental psychology and tort law, and it shows how psychological research can inform the recognition, assessment, and measurement of non-material environmental harm.Footnote 77 The term ‘solastalgia’ – first coined by philosopher Glenn Albrecht in 2003 during his fieldwork in the Upper Hunter Region of Australia, where open-pit mining was expanding – captures a form of ‘homesickness without leaving home’, the existential dread that one experiences when one’s home environment suddenly becomes inhospitable.Footnote 78 Unlike nostalgia, which is a longing for a place that one has departed, solastalgia is the pain of remaining in a degraded environment.Footnote 79
Belém is surely a place where the risk of solastalgia looms large. Climate change will change some aspects of life around the Amazon rainforest irreversibly, a point that the COP conceded implicitly when it decided to increase adaptation finance by 2035.Footnote 80 Van Eekert’s ambition appears to be to ensure that tort law does not overlook these types of harm simply because they cannot be quantified by the market.Footnote 81 This analytical enterprise is likely to bear fruit outside tort law as well. Solastalgia can inform environmental impact assessments and migration law as climate displacement accelerates, and it may enable the psychological costs of industrial expansion to be weighed against its economic benefits.Footnote 82 The Australian courts have already considered solastalgia when denying permits for mine expansion.Footnote 83 More of the same will come from the judiciary as climate change continues.
9. Shadow Governance and Regulatory Gaps: Light Pollution in EU Law
Niels Hoek’s article ‘Light Pollution in EU Law: Unveiling Shadow Governance’Footnote 84 addresses an environmental problem that has largely escaped the notice of (EU) regulators, despite its significant impacts on biodiversity, human health, and cultural heritage. Around 99% of EU citizens live beneath heavily light-polluted firmaments, and global light pollution is growing at an annual rate of 9.7%.Footnote 85 Hoek’s article asks why this harm remains unregulated at the EU level; it also introduces the concept of ‘shadow governance’ to denote the regulatory spillovers through which EU law affects light pollution indirectly.Footnote 86 Those spillover effects can be positive or negative. The widely used (but non-binding) European Committee for Standardization (CEN) lighting standardsFootnote 87 often lead to excessive illumination in rural areas because they are not sensitive to the ecological context,Footnote 88 while the Energy Labelling RegulationFootnote 89 has created a ‘LED paradox’ whereby energy-efficient lighting emits harmful blue light and reduces incentives for conservation.Footnote 90 Consumers are misled routinely about these environmental impacts.Footnote 91 By contrast, the EU Habitats DirectiveFootnote 92 can generate positive spillovers. Although it does not cover artificial lighting, the requirement to prevent deterioration of protected sites can engender obligations to reduce light pollution. That said, no EU Member State has reported enacting measures of this nature – clearly, awareness of light pollution remains limited despite the unambiguous scientific evidence of the harm it causes.Footnote 93
The underlying idea of shadow governance is important for our effort to understand how EU law operates in domains that it does not regulate expressly. In Hoek’s view, the recognition of spillovers as elements of governance opens new analytical pathways and new avenues for reform.Footnote 94 Similarly, the parties at Belém grappled with gaps between climate policy and other domains, such as trade, biodiversity, and adaptation finance. The notion of shadow governance is a poignant reminder that legal instruments discharge many of their functions implicitly and that the pursuit of environmental ends requires regulators to be as attentive to these indirect regulatory impacts as they are to those of a direct nature.
10. Conclusion
Let us revisit the themes that run through this issue. Foremost among them is the relationship between institutional form and regulatory effectiveness. Tsioumani and Rabitz document the way in which the softening of legal instruments under the CBD correlates to diminished capacity to guide national implementation;Footnote 95 Walker-Crawford shows how sophisticated corporate defensive strategies are coordinated across jurisdictions;Footnote 96 Musselli and Ituarte-Lima demonstrate that trade policy is made in a way that disadvantages environmental and human rights interests systematically;Footnote 97 Hoek explains how unintended spillovers shape shadow governance;Footnote 98 and Eckstein and co-authors draw out the implications of ownership for regulation.Footnote 99 All of these arguments have an intimate bearing on the struggles over institutional design at COP30, such as the debate about the governance of the Global Goal on Adaptation and the controversy over the new just transition mechanism.Footnote 100
The other major theme in this issue is the tension between urgency and legitimation. Unilateral measures on deforestation and pesticides by the EU purport to harness economic power for environmental ends but, as Reid and Ferrando point out, they also raise troubling questions about coloniality and its ingemination.Footnote 101 Musselli and Ituarte-Lima suggest that even well-intentioned regulatory interventions may lack legitimacy if they exclude affected communities from decision-making.Footnote 102 At Belém, multiple parties interrupted the closing plenary to object that decisions had been gavelled without proper acknowledgement of their points of order, with Panama, Uruguay, and others denouncing procedural irregularities in the adoption of the decision on the Global Goal on Adaptation.Footnote 103
Another polemical motif that recurs frequently in this issue and in policy debates is that law ought to recognize new forms of environmental harm. Van Eekert makes a powerful argument for the legal recognition and remediation of solastalgia;Footnote 104 Hoek describes a number of regulatory impacts that occur in the absence of explicit regulation;Footnote 105 and Walker-Crawford highlights the obscuration of legal responsibility through sophisticated adjudicative strategies.Footnote 106 Evidently, transnational environmental law is entering a phase of conceptual expansion in which it must develop new tools for new problems. Our current frameworks can accommodate innovation of this kind. Thus, Allain and Prihandono’s proposal to use guarantees of non-repetition to institutionalize bilateral oversight is fully compliant with the well-established doctrine of state responsibility,Footnote 107 and, likewise, Musselli and Ituarte-Lima’s proposal for more inclusive trade–policy deliberation conformable to modern trade law.Footnote 108
The course that the proceedings at COP30 took reflects the cascading complexity and ever-accelerating fluidity of transnational environmental law. The scholarship that we have assembled on the pages that follow in this issue of Transnational Environmental Law (TEL) may comfort us somewhat because it shows that we possess the intellectual resources to navigate these difficulties. Some important truths were also acknowledged at Belém, such as the irreversibility of our pursuit of lower emissions and climate-resilient development.Footnote 109 Simon Stiell, the UNFCCC Executive Secretary, urged participants to reject ‘disinformation that weaponizes the transition away from fossil fuels’.Footnote 110 The contributions to this issue of TEL will equip the reader with the analytical tools that they need to differentiate between genuine concern and strategic obstruction, between institutional reforms that enhance democratic legitimacy and those that retrench economic or cultural hegemony, and between the overt and covert ramifications of environmental governance and regulation.
11. TEL Best Article Prize 2025
Since 2022, the first issue of each new volume of TEL announces the winners of the annual TEL Best Article Prize for the most innovative and thought-provoking contribution published in TEL in the preceding year. The selection of the winning article and two honourable mentions is made by an annually rotating panel of TEL Advisory Board members, on the basis of a selection of contributions from each issue nominated by the TEL Editorial Board. The selection panel can add up to three ‘wildcards’ to this pool of articles, of pieces they deem worthy of nomination but that were not previously shortlisted by the Editors. We are delighted and most grateful that Elizabeth Macpherson and Robert Percival agreed to judge the prize this year.
It is with great pleasure that we announce the winner of the TEL Best Article Prize 2025:
Jonathan Liljeblad, ‘Clarifying Indigenous Approaches to Ecocide’Footnote 111
The judges motivated their decision by noting that ‘this article brings together two bodies of literature that are not usually combined in transnational environmental law scholarship: ecocide (within international criminal law’s engagement with environmental law) and Indigenous rights and knowledge (from critical Indigenous studies). The methodological innovation of the author fills a critical gap in legal theory, because ecocide scholarship and advocacy, while increasingly popular as an innovative response to ecological destruction, is dominated by research from the global north and routinely overlooks the rights and knowledge of Indigenous peoples. Indigenous peoples have engaged reluctantly with western, dualist conceptualizations of ecocide, which sit uneasily with often relational, Indigenous worldview. However, rather than remaining diametrically opposed to the idea of ecocide, the author develops a heuristic framework to unpack the diversity of Indigenous concerns about it, from a much-needed Indigenous position. A particular strength is the author’s organizing framework for Indigenous concerns (ontology, epistemology, methodology, and axiology) drawing together an extensive body of theoretical scholarship, especially by leading Indigenous authors. The author uses this framework to explore and elucidate Indigenous concerns with concepts like individual punishment, universalist, western definitions of ecocide, and the dualist imagining of human-nature relations. The approach enables a significant, thought-provoking contribution for other scholars, policymakers, and lawmakers about how the emerging doctrine of ecocide can develop in ways that are more diverse and representative, and reflect the rights, knowledge, and aspirations of Indigenous peoples. The article is a critical addition to the ecocide literature and encouraging of further, critical, Indigenous engagement with similar western environmental legal norms and tools’.
In addition, the selection panel awarded the following two honourable mentions:
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Ling Chen, ‘Subnational Climate Clubs: An Interactional Approach to Transnational Lawmaking’ Footnote 112
The judges awarded this article this honourable mention because ‘this article focuses on an important strategy for mobilizing climate action by subnational units of governments through “climate clubs”’. It fleshes out a multitude of unappreciated advantages of such approaches. A key strength of the article is the author’s transnational case study approach, focusing on the Western Climate Initiative and the C40 Cities Climate Leadership Group. Based on extensive interviews with officials involved in these climate clubs, the article helps shift the analytical lens from dominant state-centric models to the often-overlooked role of subnational actors. It provides a nuanced framework for understanding the means by which these subnational initiatives seek to combat free rider problems and to maintain stability and credibility in the face of not infrequent changes in political leadership. The article reveals how these clubs generate their own legal norms, promote structural stability, and enhance the legitimacy of climate action. It suggests potential pathways for climate action where such action may be hard to achieve at national and international scales’;
André Nollkaemper, ‘Avoid, Align or Contest? An Examination of National Courts’ Postures in International Climate Law Litigation’Footnote 113
In their motivation for this honourable mention, the judges noted that ‘as climate litigation proliferates in transnational environmental law, there is a growing need for empirical studies of the relative success of cases and the grounds on which they are made. This is especially the case because of the often-weak implementation of international norms domestically. This article uses a rigorous systematic method to uncover how national courts have engaged with (or avoided) international climate law. It provides useful illustrative examples from the cases to show how international climate law has been directly applied, used as an aid to interpretation of domestic law, or used to enable standing and representation for a wider class of affected persons. A particular key of this article is its empirical breadth, relying on the author’s analysis of 148 judicial cases from around the world, to reveal solid information to validate commonly held concerns about the ‘teeth’ (or lack of) of international climate law. The article advances the existing literature by developing a useful framework for categorizing the varied reactions of domestic courts to international climate law: avoidance, alignment, and contestation. The evidence uncovered in this article can be enormously useful for the development of climate scholarship and to inform the development of future climate policy at the global and local scale, but also makes a significant impact as a resource for lawyers, activists, and local communities planning and bringing climate litigation’.
The other articles shortlisted for this year’s TEL Best Article Prize were (in alphabetical order):
Aleksandra Cavoški, Robert Lee & Laura Holden, ‘The Role of Epistemic Communities in Formulating EU Policy: The PrecisionTox Project’Footnote 114
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Ben Chester Cheong, ‘Bending the Arc of Law: Positivism Meets Climate Change’s Intergenerational Challenge’Footnote 115
James Hickling, ‘The Role of Science and Historiography in the Development of Transnational Environmental Law: A New History of the 1900 London Convention for the Preservation of African Wildlife’Footnote 116
Harri Kalimo, Simon Happersberger & Eleanor Mateo, ‘Flexilateralism in EU Trade Policy: The Case of Aviation Fuels in the Hardening Environmental Trade Instruments’Footnote 117
Leanna Katz, Andrea Mariana Dominguez, Mees Brenninkmeijer, Oscar Bourgeois, Narain Yücel, Nadia Alitu Blas Rodriguez, Luis Alejandro Pebe Muñoz, Gianella Mariana Livia Riquero, Carla Arbelaez & Ilana Cohen, ‘Transnational Legal Clinic Collaboration: A Force in Global Climate Litigation’Footnote 118
Maria Lee & Chiara Armeni, ‘Participation and Protest Across Civic Space: An Environmental Law Story’Footnote 119
We heartily congratulate Jonathan Liljeblad as this year’s prize winner, and André Nollkaemper and Ling Chen as the two honourable mentions! It is a privilege to have so many excellent contributions to select from each year for the TEL Best Article Prize, and we are most grateful to our community of TEL scholars, reviewers, readers, and our wonderful editorial team, whose invaluable support enables TEL to continue to flourish!
The author of the winning article will receive an award of £250 in Cambridge University Press books, and honourable mention authors receive £50 in books. In addition, each of the authors will receive permanent access to the full journal online archive (all TEL content from volume 13 (2024) onwards is published Open Access).
12. TEL Editorial Board Announcements
It is with great gratitude that we say goodbye to Leslie-Anne Duvic Paoli. After an impressive 12 years on TEL’s editorial team, including eight years as Assistant Editor and four years on the Editorial Board, Leslie-Anne has now joined TEL’s Advisory Board. Her place on the Editorial Board is filled by another long-standing member of the TEL family, as we welcome back Jolene Lin (National University of Singapore). Jolene was previously an Editor during TEL’s formative years, for the first six volumes (2012–2017). We’re delighted to have Jolene back on the Board.
We must also say goodbye to two valued Assistant Editors. First and foremost, we extend warm thanks to Chiara Macchi for her five years on the AE team, and also to Niklas Reetz for his invaluable work this past year.
