Urgent agenda: How climate litigation builds transnational narratives

This article draws on the notion of co-production to assess the construction of
transnational narratives in climate change litigation. Using the examples of
recent cases from the Netherlands, Norway, and Ireland, the article identifies a
common narrative regarding the temporal dimension of climate change and its
governance. Litigants are shown to develop a notion of urgency for national
climate policies with the help of symbols and discourses—including pathways,
crossroads, milestones, thresholds and carbon budgets—in order to attribute
meaning to complex models of the future climate, and the immediate
responsibilities of states to limit future global warming. In response, states offer
depictions of the future in which technological and economic evolutions
render our current climate crisis less challenging and costly. This narrative
approach helps make sense of the transnational legal strategies through which
our understanding of responsibility and climate justice is unfolding.