This struggle has reawakened our imagination. … We are not fighting to tinker with reforming a system that needs to be replaced.Footnote 1
1. Introduction
Climate change poses grave intergenerational justice concerns, as its consequences will be disproportionately borne by future generations.Footnote 2 Since such a group cannot participate directly in climate policymaking, litigation has become a key strategy to represent their interests.Footnote 3 Storytelling plays a vital role in such litigation and can even be transformative.Footnote 4 Stories resonate emotionally, moving beyond the stale language of technicalities to convey urgent stakes. They can make the impacts of climate change more tangible and meaningful by bridging the gap between complex scientific concepts and personal relatability.Footnote 5 In these ways, storytelling can help to ensure that legal norms, such as specific provisions of human rights law, better accommodate intergenerational justice concerns. Beyond the law, storytelling can shape public discourse and collective imagination regarding the climate crisis.Footnote 6 Impactful storytelling can thus sway proceedings as well as trigger broader jurisprudential and societal changes.
Not all storytelling is helpful, however, and future generations litigation presents inherent storytelling challenges. As they do not yet physically exist, future generations cannot directly convey experiences or participate in the litigation process.Footnote 7 Yet, their interests are profoundly affected by today's environmental policies. Abstract and impersonal portrayals risk minimizing this complex intergenerational ethical relationship, while the representation of future generations poses its own distinct challenges.Footnote 8 In fact, the core challenge is not just that future generations cannot participate directly in proceedings, but also that they do not yet have stories of their own. As this article explores, impactful climate litigation often relies on personal narratives and individual experiences to persuade judges and juries. Yet, future generations cannot provide such intimately human stories, as they remain hypothetical rather than established collective identities. This reflects a deeper tension between the ‘planetary’ framing of future generations in the abstract versus ‘global’ litigation processes that distribute power and wealth among actual political actors. In Chakrabarty's terminology, future generations are quintessentially planetary beings, defined in biological rather than political terms.Footnote 9 The fundamental obstacle is thus translating their planetary stakes into the global sphere of litigation, where stories derive persuasive power from lived realities. This article grapples with how to compellingly represent future generations, given this disjuncture.
It should also be acknowledged that litigation premised on intergenerational rights remains a contested strategy, including among climate justice scholars.Footnote 10 While we proceed from the premise that creatively framing such cases carries potential, the risks and critiques associated with this type of litigation must also be recognized. For example, intergenerational rights-based climate litigation has been accused of depoliticizing root causes through a homogenization of responsibilities and impacts.Footnote 11 Relatedly, a future generations framing risks reinforcing entrenched normative assumptions tied to the racialized capitalist drivers of the climate crisis.Footnote 12 These risks are closely related to the use of litigation as a strategy for social change: as Krystal Two Bulls reminds us, litigation tends to involve the use of legal systems that were, in many parts of the world, forcibly imposed on colonized peoples and used to facilitate extraction, exploitation, and even genocide.Footnote 13 The dominance of Western legal systems in adjudicating universal human rights claims therefore creates a risk of obscuring colonial injustices.Footnote 14 Using litigation to tell stories not only risks reinforcing problematic cultural assumptions but can also reproduce and further entrench normative flaws embedded in our legal systems.Footnote 15
We do not propose litigation as a panacea. Rather, we suggest that strategic narrative crafting in case design and advocacy may help to mitigate risks and lend momentum to broader mobilization. Our aim is, thus, to explore productive possibilities while remaining cognizant of inherent limitations. We argue that relational approaches to storytelling, influenced by Indigenous traditions, show promise in grappling with the risks outlined above, while compellingly linking struggles across time. Relational stories and narratives recognize complex entanglements between humans and nature, and challenge disjunctive temporality.Footnote 16 They foster an expansive understanding of self as interconnected with the living world across time and space, emphasizing continuity and reciprocity between ancestors, current generations, and descendants. While scholars have identified relational storytelling as a potent strategy to ‘humanize’ the law and contribute to more inclusive legal systems,Footnote 17 legal scholarship lacks in-depth analysis of its use in climate litigation and its potential to inform approaches to the representation of future generations and their interests.
Against this backdrop, the article evaluates the potential of storytelling around future generations in climate litigation based on an original conceptual framework. The first part of this framework is set out in Section 2, with examples illustrating the role of storytelling, narratives, and framing in shaping legal norms and fostering societal change. Section 3 completes this framework, detailing specifically how relational stories and narratives can grapple with some of the challenges arising in litigation involving future generations. In Section 4, the article examines tensions that have arisen in conveying intergenerational climate obligations through cases like Urgenda Footnote 18 and Neubauer.Footnote 19 Other lawsuits – such as the Carbon Majors Inquiry,Footnote 20 Juliana,Footnote 21 and Youth Verdict Footnote 22 – have more compellingly linked struggles across time. In Section 5, we zoom in on cases showcasing Indigenous storytelling as a source of inspiration for climate litigation storytelling on future generations. Here, the emphasis lies on the vital role of Indigenous communities themselves bringing forth cases grounded in relational worldviews. While valuable lessons may be drawn from these cases, the aim is not to appropriate strategies but rather to highlight Indigenous leadership and agency in shaping litigation outcomes. The article concludes (Section 6) by reflecting on the immense yet underexplored power of storytelling to reimagine legal systems and discourse for an equitable, collective climate future across time. It emphasizes litigation's role in catalyzing public engagement as part of this transformative project.
2. The Role of Storytelling in Litigation
Storytelling plays an important role in litigation by bringing legal arguments to life.Footnote 23 As a process, it entails strategic arrangement of characters, settings, plots, and morals into resonant tales.Footnote 24 Stories generally assign meaning, provoke emotions, and humanize abstract issues, which can persuade judges and juries.Footnote 25 Narratives are the overarching frameworks constructed from the aggregation of stories.Footnote 26 They shape notions of identity, community, and belonging by guiding emotions and interpretations of facts and normative frameworks.Footnote 27 Framing, as explored by socio-legal scholars, creates a lens through which narratives and stories are viewed and understood.Footnote 28 As Hänggli and Kriesi note, a frame ‘highlights some aspects of a perceived reality and enhances a certain interpretation or evaluation or reality’,Footnote 29 thereby influencing the larger discourse about the issues in question. The interrelationship between the concepts of storytelling, narrative, framing, and discourse in litigation can thus be seen as a hierarchy or ripple effect where storytelling forms the base, aiding the formation of narratives.Footnote 30 These narratives, when framed aptly, shape the broader legal and societal discourse in line with strategic objectives.
Socio-legal scholarship on the craft of storytelling through litigation has revealed how lawyers carefully construct stories to define problems in certain ways, assign blame, and elicit moral outrage from the audience.Footnote 31 Rhetorical techniques like vivid imagery, selective emphasis of facts, and evocative language are used for maximum persuasive advantage.Footnote 32 This scholarship has also shown how effective legal stories often rely on ‘stock scripts’ – familiar narrative patterns and character archetypes that resonate with audiences.Footnote 33 For instance, depictions of plaintiffs as innocent victims and defendants as malicious villains cue instinctive reactions. Such narrative framing of characters disposes audiences to judge their claims accordingly.Footnote 34 These stock scripts already evidence the normative character of storytelling in law. In his seminal article ‘Nomos and Narrative’, Cover argues that law and narrative are inseparably related to the normative world. ‘Once understood’, Cover points out, ‘in the context of the narratives that give it meaning, law becomes not merely a system of rules to be observed, but a world in which we live’.Footnote 35
Indeed, scholarship suggests that aligning litigation narratives with the audiences’ cultural assumptions positively influences case perception. For example, Ewick and Silbey have demonstrated how narrative fidelity with embedded cultural schemas provides inherent persuasive power.Footnote 36 Stories upholding dominant worldviews often prevail in litigation, while counter-narratives face much greater scrutiny.Footnote 37 For climate litigation invoking future generations narratives, it is therefore instructive to consider how these narratives may be framed in a way that makes them appealing to judges and juries. This strategic rationale, however, needs to be balanced with the need to challenge dominant cultural assumptions intertwined with the structural issues that the litigation seeks to confront.
Various examples illustrate how storytelling can contribute to desired legal outcomes by making systemic issues personally compelling, with positive ripple effects on public discourse. For example, key tobacco lawsuits in the United States (US) are likely to have succeeded in part through gripping stories of individuals suffering from cancer.Footnote 38 These vivid accounts humanized statistical data about risks, while effectively countering influential industry propaganda that had normalized tobacco use and downplayed the health risks of smoking.Footnote 39 Similarly, environmental lawsuits spotlighting the visible impacts of pollution employ narrative techniques that render abstract or invisible harms more concrete and tangible. As Gerrard has noted, presenting environmental degradation as a personal injustice broadens engagement.Footnote 40
Legal doctrines that focus on personal or collective grievances, such as civil or human rights, make for good storytelling. In anti-discrimination suits, for instance, plaintiffs’ first-hand accounts of bias have unlocked important court victories or settlements.Footnote 41 These outcomes illustrate the potential of storytelling to reveal contradictions between core values and discriminatory practices and instil a sense of moral urgency in adjudicators. A historic example is the US constitutional case of Brown v. Board of Education.Footnote 42 By foregrounding the psychological wounds of racial segregation, the plaintiffs managed to shift the focus from legal technicalities onto the clear human stakes at hand. The Brown decision profoundly altered both law and discourse on racial segregation, marking the end of the ‘separate but equal’ doctrine and acting as a catalyst for the Civil Rights Movement.Footnote 43 It set a significant legal precedent and reshaped the national and educational discourse on racial integration and equal opportunity at the time.Footnote 44 Moreover, it prompted a shift in the federal–state dynamic in enforcing civil rights, and ignited a broader societal and international discourse on racism, equality, and human rights.Footnote 45
In South Africa, the constitutional case of Grootboom v. South Africa Footnote 46 was similarly framed within a narrative of social justice and constitutional values, with particular emphasis on its pivotal role in the post-apartheid legal system. In this case, an impoverished community that had been subjected to repeated forced displacement secured a landmark judgment from the Constitutional Court recognizing the right to adequate housing as a fundamental human right. Along with hundreds of other plaintiffs, more than half of whom were children, the charismatic lead plaintiff, Ms Grootboom, succeeded in giving ‘a human face to slum dwellers’.Footnote 47 Their testimonies not only helped to shape constitutional jurisprudence, but also led to a shift in perspectives on informal settlements among the general public.Footnote 48 This case provides another example of litigation's potential to shape legal outcomes and discourse when systemic issues are made tangible through personal stories.
Finally, while not a climate case, Oposa v. Factoran,Footnote 49 from the Philippines, sets a foundational precedent in recognizing the rights of future generations in relation to environmental harm. Minors represented by their parents filed a petition against the Philippine government for failing to protect their constitutional right to a healthy environment. The narrative centred on the concept of intergenerational justice, emphasizing that environmental degradation would harm future generations. The Supreme Court of the Philippines embraced this narrative, ruling that the plaintiffs had legal standing to sue on behalf of future generations. This landmark decision not only changed the environmental legal landscape in relation to the interests of those not yet born, but also powerfully shaped – and continues to shape – the legal discourse on intergenerational justice.Footnote 50
As climate lawsuits start to grapple with the rights and interests of future generations, they still face the distinct challenge of compellingly representing such persons who are unable to tell stories themselves. Careful narrative framing is required to avoid reinforcing unhelpful dominant normative assumptions and to inspire solidarity across space and time. The next section explores relational approaches in climate storytelling that address these complexities. Though largely unexamined in legal scholarship on climate litigation, relational frameworks provide valuable models for representing future generations in ways that contest the individualistic worldviews underpinning the climate crisis.
3. Relational Climate Justice Narratives
Litigation narratives carry the risk of reinforcing wider hegemonic discourse underlying the climate crisis and related injustices. This risk is real: as Tschakert notes, climate justice narratives have so far largely failed to represent marginalized voices, enabling ongoing ‘exclusion, erasure, and [dehumanization]’.Footnote 51 More broadly, storytelling can feed into ‘colour-blind’ narratives that downplay the differing capacities, responsibilities, and burdens of loss and damage.Footnote 52 These risks are even more pronounced in narratives focused on future generations. Specifically, the often-speculative quality of such narratives may eclipse authentic voices reflecting the lived realities of the climate crisis.Footnote 53 Narratives focused on future generations in a particular country or locality may ignore the global or spatial dimensions of intergenerational equity and justice.Footnote 54 Dystopian scenarios used to demonstrate future impacts could foster climate anxiety and paralysis, particularly among young people, undermining mobilization for climate justice.Footnote 55 Finally, as Hilson notes, future generations or future frames risk signalling that climate change is merely a future concern, leading to discounting.Footnote 56
These risks, and the tensions between them, reveal the difficulty of conveying future interests while appreciating current climate injustices. Relational narratives that recognize complex entanglements show promise in overcoming this challenge. Broadly speaking, these narratives resist the fragmentation associated with individualism and capitalist exploitationFootnote 57 and foster an expansive sense of self as deeply interconnected with the living world instead. Relational narratives resonate with a wide range of philosophical and spiritual traditions that emphasize relationality and interconnectedness.Footnote 58 However, relational worldviews are most strongly held within Indigenous societies. As Simpson points out, Indigenous knowledge systems often possess an integrated understanding of the relationship between human bodies and their surrounding environments, articulated through spiritual or cultural practices.Footnote 59 Her work details how Indigenous philosophies emphasize relationality, reciprocity, and collective continuity with the living world.Footnote 60 Indigenous scholars like Kimmerer similarly emphasize reciprocity between ancestors, current generations, and descendants.Footnote 61 This reciprocity is closely related to traditional territories, which are inherited from ancestors and to be cared for in ways that benefit current and future generations.Footnote 62 The ‘Seventh Generation Principle’ of the Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) Confederacy, whereby decisions made today should be geared towards ensuring a sustainable world seven generations into the future, is a well-known expression of this ethos.Footnote 63 Indigenous conceptions of temporality as ‘spiralling’, lived through narratives of, among others, cyclicality and reversal, challenge dystopian narratives of climate crises.Footnote 64 In other Indigenous traditions the temporal disjunction between past, present, and future collapses altogether, such as in Aboriginal Dreaming, which is a time that has been referred to by Stanner as ‘everywhen’. As Stanner puts it: ‘One cannot “fix” The Dreaming in time: it was, and is, everywhen’.Footnote 65 Storytelling tradition is central to these narratives.Footnote 66 Crucially, it often involves a continuous dialogue with ancestors and descendants.Footnote 67 Animals, plants, and entities such as water are seen as knowledge bearers in their own right and form part of these collectives.Footnote 68
Several strands of contemporary scholarship have likewise sought to develop relational frameworks that can bridge divisions across time, space, and species, often drawing from Deleuze's Spinozist monism.Footnote 69 For example, Alaimo identifies intergenerational justice as a promising frame for storytelling, explaining how it acknowledges temporal interdependencies and collective responsibilities.Footnote 70 This frame draws on trans-corporeality, understood as a ‘theoretical site’, which highlights material exchanges across bodily borders.Footnote 71 As part of new materialist scholarship, trans-corporeality aims to disrupt dualistic modes of thinking that separate humans from their environment.Footnote 72 It expressly draws on insights from the natural sciences, such as the understanding that humans, as ‘microbial crowds’, are inseparable from non-human life.Footnote 73 Feminist scholarship extends this further, critiquing dualistic conceptions of humanity versus nature as enabling exploitation.Footnote 74 Through this lens, the climate crisis may be seen as ‘a relational crisis, reflective of the dominant culture's collective states of disassociation and disorientation’.Footnote 75 While the foundation of this scholarship is largely Western,Footnote 76 it intersects with the Indigenous relational epistemologies discussed above.Footnote 77
As diverse as they are, the relational perspectives and practices discussed here all contest the notion of individuals that are firmed up in time within the physical boundaries of a single body. In this way, they reframe climate justice beyond the human towards multispecies, intergenerational entanglements.Footnote 78 We should underscore here that while the emphasis on entanglement may appear to be mostly descriptive, it inevitably raises questions about normative applications. In particular, how should resources, power, and opportunities be distributed if humans are not discrete moral agents but rather intricately enmeshed material-discursive phenomena? This pressing question reveals tensions between relational theories debunking anthropocentrism and normative frameworks premised on human exceptionalism.
While some scholarship engages this tension, examining environmental ethics and multispecies justice from a relational lens,Footnote 79 explicit reflection remains limited. This article does not profess resolution but rather aims to consider how relational insights might inform litigation storytelling to catalyze more ethical and inclusive outcomes. It explores whether relational narratives may foster receptiveness to alternative distributions of power and resources aligned with climate justice, even if – or precisely because – they transverse boundaries between ‘human’ and ‘nature’. This may be achieved, for example, where relational perspectives effectively dismantle cultural narratives based on a linear notion of progress fuelled by perpetual economic growth,Footnote 80 or by countering capitalist and colonial ideologies enabling the climate crisis.Footnote 81 It may also transpire where stories foregrounding interconnectivity confront climate individualization and underscore systemic solutions. In its most potent form, relational storytelling manifests as intellectual resistance,Footnote 82 using the socially situated epistemic advantage of marginalized groups to demonstrate how equity can be reconciled across groups and time. As Gutiérrez points out, precisely by challenging the traditional power dynamics in legal discourse, climate litigation can catalyze public engagement for transformation beyond reactive reforms.Footnote 83 This understanding informs the analysis of climate litigation storytelling below, which grapples with translating future generations’ interests into compelling yet strategic narratives.
Finally, before examining litigation narratives, it is important to note complexities within intergenerational equity frameworks themselves. We note that time and temporality are contested and that Indigenous concepts of time can collapse past, present, and future (such as ‘everywhen’, referred to above, as describing the temporalities of Aboriginal Dreaming).Footnote 84 In Western thinking, notions of justice between generations are often complicated by competing temporal assumptions and obligations to posterity.Footnote 85 For instance, utilitarian philosophical approaches often emphasize short-term projections of costs versus benefits, discounting future interests.Footnote 86 In contrast, deontological perspectives tend to consider moral duties regardless of temporality,Footnote 87 and scepticism about meaningfully conveying future interests raises questions about standing and justiciability.Footnote 88 Strategic storytelling must address these tensions or even aim to disrupt Western temporality itself. As explored further below, narratives premised on reciprocity across time may resonate more profoundly than abstract projections of harm. By framing intergenerational ties through lived experience in ancestral traditions, relational stories offer means of overcoming tempo-spatial divisions. Still, we underscore that translating future stakes into compelling narratives for modern legal systems remains an inherently complex pursuit.
4. Climate Litigation Narratives in Practice
How have recent climate lawsuits incorporated intergenerational frameworks through strategic narrative choices? While relational frameworks recognize complex interconnections obscured by individualism, some leading cases reveal tensions in representing future generations and highlighting injustices across time and space.
For example, the landmark case Urgenda Foundation v. State of the Netherlands initially granted standing to Dutch environmental non-governmental organization (NGO) Urgenda based in part on representing the interests of future generations.Footnote 89 However, this was overturned on appeal,Footnote 90 with the Dutch Supreme Court recognizing Urgenda's standing only on behalf of current generations living in the Netherlands.Footnote 91 As noted elsewhere,Footnote 92 this decision effectively ignored considerations of intergenerational equity and contradicts core tenets of climate justice. Although the Supreme Court eventually issued a landmark ruling mandating emissions reduction, its narrow standing analysis lost the initial framing on intergenerational obligations.Footnote 93 The abstract and impersonal way that future generations were represented in legal arguments may have contributed to this outcome.Footnote 94 The framing of the case may further be critiqued for rendering invisible the disproportionate climate impacts already suffered by billions of predominantly black and brown people outside the Netherlands, which helped to create a ‘colour-blind’ transnational narrative.Footnote 95
In contrast, the German case of Neubauer et al. v. Germany Footnote 96 featured powerful first-hand testimony from youth plaintiffs from Bangladesh, Nepal, and Germany about how climate change threatens their future. Although the case did not directly involve the representation of future generations understood as those who are as yet unborn, it offers valuable insights into the potential implications of a future generations framing in climate litigation. On the one hand, presenting youth plaintiffs as a ‘bridge’ to the future is likely to have played a key role in the resulting ruling by the German Constitutional Court, which established a violation of the German youth's fundamental freedoms based on the newly developed principle of ‘intertemporal guarantees of freedom’.Footnote 97 Unfortunately, however, the singular focus on future impacts may have inadvertently obscured issues of intragenerational equity and climate justice.Footnote 98 This obscurement manifested legally in the dismissal of the claims of the Bangladeshi and Nepalese youth for lack of standing.Footnote 99 Further, it is visible in the lack of serious regard for historical emissions in the determination of Germany's mitigation obligations.Footnote 100 As in Urgenda, these outcomes illustrate Humphreys’ concerns about privileging speculative future harm over addressing the urgent needs of those most affected by climate impacts and correcting related historical inequities.Footnote 101 In anticipation of future rulings, it is also pertinent to mention Duarte v. Portugal,Footnote 102 a case pending before the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR), which raises similar concerns and may set a significant precedent in climate litigation.
The Carbon Majors Inquiry Footnote 103 of the Philippines Human Rights Commission is a powerful example of how climate litigation storytelling can centre those most affected while confronting systemic issues. This case spotlighted survivors of typhoon Yolanda (Haiyan) – the deadliest typhoon in modern records of the Philippines – and testified to the immense personal tragedies experienced. For example, a young woman explained how losing her home and cherished personal possessions felt like losing ‘my identity, my dreams, my significance as a person’.Footnote 104 This first-hand conveying of climate impacts counteracted dominant narratives that downplayed the human costs. The Commission found the extreme impacts of climate change to ‘dehumanize’ people, reflecting the successful framing of the case around human experiences to compellingly reveal collective stakes.Footnote 105 Equally important, however, is the attribution of those experiences to the exploitative practices of fossil fuel companies.Footnote 106 As Nosek observes, this framing effectively countered the broader discourse on individual responsibility for the climate crisis, which the fossil fuel industry itself has been working tirelessly to promote.Footnote 107 While not grappling explicitly with future generations’ representation, the Commission embraced the petitioners’ broad temporal framing, which emphasized ‘the harrowing situation of the Filipino people who have suffered, will continue to suffer, and have yet to suffer as they are deprived of their human rights by the myriad effects of climate change’.Footnote 108
Juliana v. United States is notable for foregrounding the youth plaintiffs’ spiritual and emotional bonds with threatened ecosystems through effective storytelling.Footnote 109 By emphasizing nature's intrinsic value, the narrative emerging from these stories challenges conceptions of the environment as merely a resource for human use.Footnote 110 Of great significance also is the display of youth resilience in protecting their heritage for future generations, inspiring adults ‘to never give up on behalf of the world's children’.Footnote 111 This resilience-focused narrative rejects victimhood and instead asserts a relational continuity across time.Footnote 112 In doing so, it avoids inadvertently undermining intergenerational solidarity by portraying children as innocent victims of the decisions by older generations in power. As in Carbon Majors, the emphasis in Juliana on the accountability of a major historical polluter reinforces an important part of the discourse on climate justice. The narrative falls short, however, of addressing both inter- and intragenerational equity in a holistic fashion. To achieve this, it would have needed to consider how the excessive contributions of the US to atmospheric greenhouse gas emissions are causing harm globally, including in climate-vulnerable states like the Philippines.
Together, these cases show how storytelling in climate litigation can support intergenerational narratives that effectively counter individualistic or divisive assumptions. However, the cases also show the complexity involved in using storytelling as part of climate litigation strategies, including the risk of downplaying or even undermining key aspects of climate justice. The next section explores how Indigenous storytelling provides valuable models for representing future generations’ interests while shaping legal norms and procedures in the process. It shows how taking Indigenous cosmologies seriously in the design of climate litigation cases can not only challenge dominant cultural narratives that are intertwined with the climate crisis but also help to ensure that remedial measures are better aligned with inter- and intragenerational justice.
5. Indigenous Leadership in Storytelling
Indigenous storytelling harbours enormous potential for shaping the representation of future generations in climate litigation. Indigenous narratives not only provide a lens onto the spiritual and cultural devastation inflicted by climate impacts but also underscore the sacred interconnectivity between human communities and the broader living world.Footnote 113 This analysis draws upon cases from around the world to illustrate the potential of Indigenous storytelling to help to comprehend nature, as Auz puts it, ‘from the voices that live with and in it’.Footnote 114
Indigenous plaintiffs have achieved significant victories in cases grounded in relational worldviews. In Held v. Montana,Footnote 115 for instance, Indigenous plaintiffs explained their community's profound bond with the threatened natural world. Specifically, Sariel and others articulated how their physical and mental health, and even their survival, depended on their ability to hunt game, gather medicinal plants, and practise their religion, all intrinsically linked to the health of the land and the environment.Footnote 116 This ancestral environmental knowledge, transmitted across generations, established a critical continuum between past, present, and future. The Montana court's ruling formally recognized injuries to ‘cultural traditions’ and ‘way of life’, signalling receptiveness to the relational themes woven into the Indigenous narratives.Footnote 117 The ruling also represents an important normative development, with the holistic, long-term view of environmental stewardship reflected in the court's interpretation of the right to a ‘clean and healthful environment’ protected under Montana's Constitution.Footnote 118
In Australia, Youth Verdict Footnote 119 resulted in the rejection of a proposed coal mine in Queensland, on the basis of its human rights impacts. First Nations storytelling foregrounded an intergenerational dimension, which not only went to the heart of whether Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples in Queensland could continue to transmit their culture but also squarely challenged normative disjunctive temporalities of past, present, and future. As put in Juritju Fourmile's testimony:
We as Indigenous people, First Nations people don't just think about one generation or ourselves. We think about the generations that come after us, those that come before us as well. We learn their lessons and we take on their lessons and their knowledge.Footnote 120
This testimony weaved in relationships with other species and places as well as justice for future generations:
It's the trees. Those trees are connected to this land. We as people are connected to those trees. They die, we die. Think of it holistically, the bigger picture, you know? If – I'm young. I'm only 25 years old and I've been brought into this. I've been born into this. I've been born into people's past mistakes, and hopefully we can correct them, because if we can't correct them, what's the – what's – what's the point for the next generation coming through? What choice do they have? Are they going to be able to look after this land correctly? Will they have the tools to look after this land correctly?Footnote 121
At the international level, the landmark case of Billy v. Australia Footnote 122 similarly used a legal framework of individual rights to convey stories of climate losses that were nevertheless, in effect, communal and intergenerational. One of the petitioners, Keith Pabai, explained:
The Island makes us who we are. Our whole life comes from the island and the nature here, the environment. It is a spiritual connection. We know how to hunt and fish from this island – to survive here. We get that from generations of knowledge that have been passed down to us. That is the cultural inheritance we teach our children. It is so important to us, this strong spiritual connection to this island, our homeland.Footnote 123
Yessie Mosby, another plaintiff, elaborated in the petition on how the Islanders could not teach children about their inheritance and culture in another man's land, separated from the sacredness and power of their own.Footnote 124 The petition quoted from the Inter-American Court of Human Rights (IACtHR) landmark decision in Mayagna (Sumo) Awas Tingni Community v. Nicaragua, which recognized Indigenous relationships to land as ‘not merely a matter of possession and production but a material and spiritual element which they must fully enjoy, even to preserve their cultural legacy and transmit it to future generations’.Footnote 125 This ruling forms part of a broader body of Inter-American jurisprudence shaped by Indigenous storytelling. An inspiring example is the case of Kichwa People v. Ecuador,Footnote 126 in which a relational narrative informed the finding of the IACtHR that permitting an oil company to carry out oil exploration activities on the Sarayukas’ territory, without prior consultation, violated their rights under the American Convention on Human Rights (ACHR).Footnote 127 The case turned on the impacts of oil drilling on the ‘living forest’ and its spiritual beings, as conveyed by a 92-year-old Yachak shaman:
In [the sector of the forest where explosives remain], half the beings that preserved the ecosystem have now gone … They are the ones that maintain the jungle, the woods. If there is too much destruction … the mountains will also collapse.Footnote 128
The IACtHR ruling emphasized the sacredness of the forest and how the plaintiffs’ identity revolved around their relationship with the land.Footnote 129 Building on this jurisprudence, the Indigenous plaintiffs in Billy v. Australia Footnote 130 successfully argued that threats to passing down cultural knowledge and traditions on ancestral lands would violate their rights to culture and family life under the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR).Footnote 131 These outcomes demonstrate how storytelling, when combined with strategically crafted legal arguments, can enhance accountability for climate injustices and shape legal norms through judicial interpretation.
The narrative developed in Rights of Indigenous People Footnote 132 reflects an even stronger climate justice framing, situating climate impacts within a factual framework of ongoing colonial dispossession. The petition to ten Special Rapporteurs of the United Nations (UN) Human Rights Council not only documented the impacts of climate change on the petitioners’ human rights but also provided a detailed account of their experience as Indigenous peoples in the US whose sovereignty continues to be denied, explaining how these distinct injustices are intertwined and mutually reinforcing. This counter-narrative was reinforced in media appearances, such as that of Nathan Jessee, observing that:
It seems as though the migration and assimilation of Indigenous peoples is treated as a foregone conclusion while the state accommodates a future for settler industries and leisure, perhaps an example of what anthropologist Elizabeth Marino termed ‘adaptation oppression’ and ‘adaptation privilege.’ … [T]his is not new. Settler colonialism has long stifled Indigenous adaptation and environmental knowledge as a strategy for expropriating lands and development.Footnote 133
The petition included evidence of government officials denying the Indigenous petitioners aid or excluding them from legal protection to which they were entitled.Footnote 134 In legal terms, these stories provided compelling evidence of the claim that the US had violated the petitioners’ right to self-determination and related human rights. By integrating these historic injustices, the narrative emphasized continuity through time and relationally across groups.Footnote 135 Centring Indigenous voices and intergenerational knowledge transmission further served to challenge assumptions of human dominance over nature.Footnote 136 In the words of Chief Shirell:
We have joined together with our Alaskan relatives to bring awareness to the damage caused by greed and selfishness, with a complete disregard for Mother Earth and all living beings. We are showing the world that you do not have to just sit by and watch our planet, our health and lifeways be destroyed. We do not have to accept the repeated attempts of genocide against our peoples.Footnote 137
The link between Indigenous rights and fossil fuel extraction has been foregrounded in numerous other rights-based cases.Footnote 138 Particularly noteworthy are Indigenous-led cases or initiatives seeking to broaden the concept of legal personhood by allocating legal personality and rights to ecosystems and species.Footnote 139 A poignant example is the legal effort of the White Earth Band of Ojibwe to protect manoomin (wild rice), asserting the ‘Rights of Manoomin’ to stop the construction of oil and gas infrastructure near the Standing Rock community.Footnote 140 This groundbreaking case builds on the Indigenous plaintiffs’ worldview to frame a distinct part of nature as a subject with legal rights, thus challenging hegemonic legal norms and narratives. Another example is legislation in New Zealand resulting from a settlement with Whanganui Māori iwi, following breaches of treaty obligations by the New Zealand Crown, which gave legal personhood to the Whanganui river.Footnote 141 Cases like these represent examples of how relational frameworks can potentially shape legal norms through the process of litigation.Footnote 142
The seminal Colombian case of Future Generations v. Ministry of the Environment and Others Footnote 143 provides a clear illustration of these developments in a climate context. In this case, the plaintiffs innovatively employed a relationality-based storytelling approach that aligns with Indigenous worldviews. By strategically framing the Amazon as a living entity with intrinsic rights, the plaintiffs invoked Indigenous perspectives that see land and nature as interwoven in a complex network of relationships with humans and other beings.Footnote 144 This narrative method served as a conduit for the court to acknowledge the Amazon as a rights-bearing subject, thereby affirming Indigenous cosmologies.Footnote 145 The resulting legal breakthrough both broadens and complicates the Amazon's relational standing within ecological, social, and legal frameworks, thereby moving closer to the holistic understandings often found in Indigenous philosophies. It illustrates how the use of storytelling can produce an evolutionary challenge to conventional legal frameworks.Footnote 146
LaDuke's perspective underscores the unwavering commitment of Indigenous groups to protect the Earth ‘so that our ways of life are not lost and the next generation will have a place to call home’.Footnote 147 These narratives serve as models for compelling representation of human and more-than-human kin, and have played a pivotal role in securing ‘hard-fought victories’ in court battles against powerful opponents, which include multinational mining, lumber, and oil companies.Footnote 148 Remarkable about these victories is that even judges who might personally dismiss as absurd the idea of a sacred mountain or a river as an ancestor, have shown a willingness to recognize them in legal terms.Footnote 149 Given the position of the judiciary as a stronghold of institutional modernity, this apparent receptiveness to the resurging global influence of notions related to sacred nature underscores how relational narratives can resonate across groups and generations.Footnote 150
This power is further illustrated by the emphasis of the campaign against the Dakota Access Pipeline on the sanctity of more-than-human relatives. Remarkably, the campaign's appeal extended to a global audience, with people from Iraq, Egypt, various European countries, and the Philippines, among others, joining the Indigenous and other American activists in rituals and other forms of protest.Footnote 151 As Ghosh observes, the activists’ shared understanding of the sanctity of the landscape emerged from empathy, an innate capacity of humans and many other life-forms. Critically, it is this capacity that is nurtured by stories.Footnote 152
6. Conclusion
This article has analyzed the potential of storytelling in climate litigation grappling with obligations to future generations. It explored how litigation narratives may either reinforce or challenge the dominant cultural assumptions underpinning the climate crisis. Stories grounded in relationality, interdependence, and continuity show promise in contesting individualistic worldviews that obscure collective stakes.
The cases discussed reveal techniques for communicating climate threats and impacts through human experiences and relationality. They also showed how linking climate harm to ongoing injustice exposes root causes. Indigenous victories won by underscoring spiritual connections with threatened ecosystems model relational approaches. Yet, crafting compelling representations of future generations who are necessarily absent from proceedings remains challenging. Victimhood tropes risk promoting divisions rather than solidarity across time. Climate storytelling must tread carefully to highlight inextricable connections while inspiring action.
As climate litigation proliferates worldwide, storytelling practices will shape public discourse on intergenerational obligations. This article suggests that relational frameworks can illuminate entanglements that dominant paradigms conceal. Stories awakening the moral imagination to our shared destiny across generations can catalyze climate action beyond reactive reforms. Just as scientists have found that complementing science with Indigenous traditional knowledge greatly enriches scientific understanding,Footnote 153 practitioners committed to climate justice can learn from Indigenous storytelling in co-designing cases with impact. This collaborative synergy holds profound potential for reimagining legal systems and actualizing collective caretaking across boundaries and generations.
In pursuing this path, it is essential to ensure that the outcomes of climate litigation genuinely advance the struggle for climate justice. This requires a careful assessment of how legal arguments and storytelling approaches are perceived, and the impact they exercise on various stakeholders and power structures. Given the diverse and sometimes conflicting interests involved in climate issues, the effectiveness of relational narratives in bringing about meaningful change should not be taken for granted. Persistent and shifting forms of racism and neo-colonialism (including contemporary populism) in many societies further enhance the risk of relational narratives facing resistance or failing in litigation.
Therefore, these approaches must navigate the delicate balance between ideological integrity and strategic pragmatism. This balancing act requires a nuanced understanding of the potential risks and benefits of different narrative strategies. In fact, one of those benefits for Indigenous peoples is the expression of their worldviews, law, and sovereignty in and through story, regardless of whether the case succeeds.Footnote 154 In this endeavour, the importance of integrity, including epistemological integrity, cannot be overstated. As Koenig and Sakulkarunaarree noted in connection with climate science, the justice system's role in ensuring that decision making is grounded in solid evidence and truth is a cornerstone of achieving real climate justice.Footnote 155 This commitment to truth is not just a moral imperative but also a strategic one, as it underpins the credibility and effectiveness of climate litigation. By rooting storytelling techniques in robust evidence and holistic understanding of the historical drivers, lived realities, and long-term impacts of climate disruption, climate litigators can strengthen their cases while fostering a legal and societal environment conducive to comprehensive and just responses. It is then up to judges – and potentially much larger audiences – to walk through the doors that stories have opened.
Many questions remain for future research. How can local climate stories invoking future generations inspire global solidarity? What narrative techniques build empathy across groups? What genres or metaphors enhance climate litigation resonance? The stakes could not be higher in this project of narrating a future worth fighting for.
Acknowledgements
The authors would like to extend gratitude to Katalin Sulyok, Ole Pedersen, and all participants in the workshop ‘Future Generations Litigation’ held on 8–9 June 2023 at ELTE University Law School in Budapest (Hungary) for a stimulating discussion around a first draft of this manuscript.
Funding statement
Not applicable.
Competing interests
The authors declare none.
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