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Climate Change in Court: Making Neighbourly Relations in a Warming World

Walker-Crawford, David Noah

[Thesis]. Manchester, UK: The University of Manchester; 2021.

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Abstract

In a ground-breaking lawsuit, the Peruvian farmer Saul Luciano Lliuya took the German energy giant RWE to court over its contribution to climate change impacts in the Andes. With support from German climate activists, Saul seeks to establish a legal precedent to hold greenhouse gas emitters responsible. Based on 20 months of ethnographic fieldwork in the Peruvian Andes, German courts, and at UN Summits, this study traces how the claim configures climate change in terms of neighbourly relations and examines the legal and moral notions of responsibility at stake. Taking analytical inspiration from the legal argumentation, I develop an ethnographic approach to studying climate change that focuses on neighbourly relations. While climate change is an overwhelming process enveloping the entire planet, many people grasp its significance in terms of the relations it creates between those who have polluted the atmosphere and those who now face devastating environmental transformations. The legal conception of neighbourliness provides the analytical cornerstone for an ethnographically grounded understanding of climate change that foregrounds the ethical relations at stake and provides a framework to study power relations and climate politics in action. While the judicial framework restricts involvement to legally recognised persons such as Saul and RWE, I show how other potential actors including Andean earth beings might also have a stake in climate change discussions. I unpick how legal arguments about causality strategically deploy scientific evidence. During judicial proceedings, lawyers and judges expressed their awareness that the case concerned much more than the relation between Saul and RWE. Scientific climate change models become ethically and politically charged as they provide the foundation for causal responsibility arguments. Returning to the Peruvian Andes, I examine how people engage the changing environment as a powerful, sentient force, yet such perspectives are absent from scientific and legal accounts. Finally, I reflect on the implications of this neighbourly approach to climate change for law, climate politics, and anthropological practice. This thesis contributes to discussions in anthropology, socio-legal studies, and STS concerning climate change, climate litigation, environmental claim-making, and cosmopolitics. Climate litigation provides a valuable opportunity for an ethnographically grounded analysis of social relations in times of global warming. This study highlights the value-laden nature of climate science while also uncovering other knowledges and ways of being at stake in contemporary concerns about climate change.