Courts as Actors in Global Environmental Politics

Environmental conflicts are increasingly being fought in courtrooms rather than legislatures. Yet can litigation do more than resolve individual disputes? Can it reshape the norms that govern the relationship between human rights and the environment?

In Courts as Actors in Global Environmental Politics, Defne Gönenç explores how courts are reshaping the relationship between environmental protection and human rights, revealing how legal struggles can create new ways of understanding the right to a clean and healthy environment. Gönenç introduces the concept of norm fusion to explain how litigation can bring together previously distinct normative frameworks and contribute to broader processes of legal and political change. Drawing on landmark cases from India and Turkey, Defne Gönenç offers a timely account of how activists, lawyers, judges, and state officials use litigation to link environmental concerns with human rights claims.

Courts as Actors in Global Environmental Politics is written for scholars and students in environmental politics, international relations, human rights, and socio-legal studies, as well as those interested in courts, activism, and political change. Bridging international relations, socio-legal studies, and political economy, this book offers a novel framework for understanding the role of litigation in environmental governance and global normative change.