Chapter 5 addresses the potential use of climate engineering technologies as a way of counteracting anthropogenic global warming. These technologies encompass methods for the permanent removal of atmospheric carbon dioxide, for instance via its direct capture from ambient air and subsequent geological storage. They also include more controversial technologies that would modify the planetary albedo in order to reflect a small fraction of incoming sunlight back into space in order to induce an artificial cooling effect. These two sets of technologies play out against the background of the increasingly dim prospects of achieving international temperature targets in line with the 2015 Paris Agreement. The chapter traces institutional responses to both negative emissions technologies and solar geoengineering across a multitude of international forums, including the Convention on Biological Diversity, the London Convention on the Dumping of Waste at Sea, and the Paris Agreement itself.

This chapter explores the potential role of national and international courts and tribunals in relation to claims for environmental damage to areas beyond national jurisdiction (ABNJ). Access to remedies includes facilitating access to international and national courts to initiate claims for environmental harm, but also requires consideration of the associated rules that may constrain the ability of the court or tribunal in question to provide relief, such as jurisdiction, rules on the choice of law and the recognition and enforcement of judgments rendered in such cases. The chapter begins with a discussion of the general rules and principles concerning access to remedies under the rules of state responsibility and domestic civil liability, respectively, before turning to the specific rules in ABNJ. It also addresses the substantial additional challenges that each of these sets of rules pose to realizing the goals of liability regimes, including the need to prevent environmental harm and restore the environment, to provide for effective deterrence of risky behaviour, to ensure a level playing field and to ensure adequate and prompt compensation.

Chapter 1 introduces the concept of transformative novel technologies in the context of the contemporary global environmental crisis. It discusses how technology is central to the crisis as well as its potential resolution, although its status is frequently ambiguous and contested. The chapter makes the case that governance solutions, including at the international level, are indispensable in order to capitalize on the potential benefits of transformative novel technologies, to avoid their various potential downsides, or both. The empirical case studies of the book are then previewed: biotechnology, specifically novel methods for large-scale biological control as well as the utilization of digital sequence information in research, development and innovation; climate engineering, a series of proposed methods for large-scale intervention into the climate system; and mining beyond national jurisdictions, where various technological developments increasingly enable the extraction of metals critical to a global sustainability transition from areas that were previously inaccessible.

This chapter reconstructs an anti-imperial popular sovereignty. Via Martin Luther King, Jr.’s essay “Beyond Vietnam,” I theorize how peoples are lured to partake in imperial projects that benefit global oligarchies. In response, King proposes a geopolitics of popular sovereignty that calls peoples to position themselves historically vis-à-vis other peoples who are the targets of aggression. This requires the people to differentiate their own popular will from oligarchic projects of outward domination and to withdraw demands for well-being that depend on the exploitation of others and the crushing of revolutionary movements. This tradition of popular sovereignty urges worldliness and historical awareness among western peoples and extends anti-oligarchic discourses of peoplehood to criticize unholy western alliances with elites in the developing world. I juxtapose this account with Frantz Fanon’s writings on postcolonial democracy, national consciousness, and transnationalism, which criticize postcolonial oligarchies that remain wedded to empire and demand a parallel recognition. This reading yields a renewed language of popular sovereignty that identifies potential radical affinities between differently located collectives struggling against global capitalist accumulation violently enabled by dominant states.

The Conclusion recaps the book’s contributions and complements Chapter 5’s account of anti-imperial popular sovereignty by theorizing solidarity among the multiple positionalities covered in the book (Indigenous, settler, slave, forced refugee, diaspora settler, migrant settler, and other statuses). These statuses do not make the constitution of a people impossible but make the interrelations between these subjects the core of the “whole” we conceptualize. These interrelations include linkages with nature, which popular sovereignty leaves outside of its purview. An “ecological popular sovereignty” corrects this by recognizing the essential dependence of communities on nature, requiring relations of reciprocity and care toward nature. Joining anti-imperial and ecological as modifiers of popular sovereignty allows for its theorization without actively obscuring its material underpinnings. In particular, this way of theorizing popular sovereignty shifts the meaning of settler from an identity to a way of relating to other humans and to land, and provides parameters for evaluating political action for their (in)justice implications. This recasting presupposes a radical critique of private ownership of land, because capitalism’s right to charge humans for the right to occupy the earth sacrifices constructive relations with land and the attendant social relationalities.

The allocation of liability for environmental harm in areas beyond national jurisdiction (ABNJ) is complicated by several factors relating to the nature of the activities undertaken and the nature of environmental harm itself. These include the range of actors involved in activities that may give rise to environmental harm, and features of cumulative environmental damage, arising over a course of time either out of a connected or unconnected set of activities involving multiple actors or from external natural causes. To address these issues, this chapter outlines legal approaches to causation and the challenges that complex causal pathways may present in ABNJ. It then discusses the general approach to allocating responsibility to states and international organizations under international law and national law, and the channeling of liability to operational entities which is the principal approach in sector-specific civil liability regimes. Finally, it explores the rules that structure the allocation of liability in relation to specific ABNJ regimes and activities.

In order to realize the fundamental goals of liability rules, it is necessary to secure potential future liabilities through financial assurances. Financial assurances are key to ensuring ’prompt and adequate compensation’ and for the availability of funds to protect and preserve the environmental resources that have been harmed. This chapter examines the various types of assurances, such as insurance and compensation funds, that are currently used within civil liability regimes generally, before exploring the existing and emerging practices within the Antarctic, deep seabed and high seas regimes.

Environmental harm in areas beyond national jurisdiction (ABNJ) raises distinct issues of standing because of the collective nature of environmental interests in these areas, including who has the right (or obligation) to take the necessary response action to address environmental harm. Both international law and national law recognize that certain actors have sufficient legal interest to bring claims for environmental damage despite not directly suffering injury or loss. These developments reflect an increasing recognition of the intrinsic value of the environment and shifting conceptions of the environment as a collective good subjective to community interests. However, the parameters of the concepts that affirm collective interests in the protection of the environment are nebulous and the scenarios in which they would apply are likely to be contested. In considering the application of the rules of standing in ABNJ, this chapter explores trends in standing in relation to the environment under international law, civil liability regimes and national law before turning to how the specific regimes governing areas beyond national jurisdiction address the issue of standing.

This chapter provides an overview of the different approaches taken by the international community to address liability from environmental harm and how these approaches respond to the unique legal and practical issues associated with areas beyond national jurisdiction. Since liability rules that affect the commons environment exist in both international and national legal systems, the discussion begins with an examination of state responsibility and unharmonized domestic liability, before discussing various approaches to harmonizing civil liability rules through treaties. The discussion of approaches to liability is framed by consideration of the various purposes that liability rules and processes serve in international environmental law.

Chapter 4 addresses the broader field of biotechnology, where two recent technological developments are highly consequential for the global politics of environmental sustainability. The first is the trend towards the utilization of digitalized genetic sequence data via big data methods. This offers novel prospects for biodiversity conservation but also threatens to undermine long-standing international commitments towards the fair and equitable sharing of benefits associated with the physical genetic material corresponding to these sequence data. The second development is novel methods for large-scale genetic manipulation of wild species, offering significant potential for conservation but at the price of unprecedented biosafety challenges. The chapter investigates the responses to these technological developments under the Convention on Biological Diversity, the International Treaty on Plant Genetic Resources for Food and Agriculture, as well as the World Health Organization.

This chapter explores further the material and imperial bases of popular sovereignty by tracking the entanglements between socialist and imperialist discourse. White labor activists in the Anglo world borrowed from imperial scripts to mark nonwhite migrants as a threat while demanding their own incorporation, which solidified settler projects. These demands depended on the continuous extreme exploitation of non-white workers at home and abroad and – while part of an imperial transnational imagination – resulted in the absorption of imperial labor control functions by national systems of migration control. The encounter between capitalists interested in accessing cheap labor by racialized subjects, elite projects invested in sheltering white settler spaces, and white workers concerned with protecting their own labor from competition converged in founding moments of the people in the metropole. White labor’s embrace of racial prejudice over labor solidarity created segregated labor spaces that fit with both capitalist goals of labor control and reinforced settler colonialism. The analysis recasts immigration as a central historical force that shaped and sustained racial capitalism and democratic politics in the core, making the case for its more serious theorization and incorporation into critical theory frameworks.