More than half a century after the Club of Rome warned of the ecological limits to exponential growth, the global legal order continues to rest on premises that deny planetary finitude. While the Paris Agreement on climate change was hailed as a major diplomatic victory, it has proven insufficient in the face of rising emissions, extractive urbanism, and mass displacement. In this context, law risks becoming a language of delay—a structure that manages collapse rather than averting it.
And yet, within—and against—the law, new imaginaries persist. Artists, jurists, and communities are drafting their own climate contracts, forms of municipal resistance, and poetic constitutions of the commons.
AWC: A decade after the Paris Agreement, the planet is warmer, displacement is accelerating, and fossil fuel subsidies continue. What, in your view, did the Paris Agreement actually achieve—legally, symbolically, and/or strategically?
Ingo Venzke (IV): The greatest achievement of the Paris Agreement is the postulation of the concrete temperature target of limiting global warming to 1.5°C. This agreed target has been mobilized on the streets, in parliaments, and in courtrooms. It is a crucial anchor for progressive climate politics, a backbone premise that supports countless other claims.
Take the leading climate case before the German Constitutional Court, for example. The court held that Germany’s climate law was unconstitutional because it delayed action for too long, leaving younger generations to shoulder an excessive burden later on. The court reached this conclusion by grounding its reasoning on the 1.5˚C target.
For the International Court of Justice, the Paris Agreement and its temperature goal also played a pivotal role in its recent Advisory Opinion on Climate Change: the court read and clarified states’ obligations in light of that agreed target.
AWC: How can international law be an instrument of transformation under capitalism?
Christina Eckes (CE): The wheels of international law turn slowly. However, when properly implemented, international law provides several principles that could fundamentally change the current course of our economy. In July 2025, the Inter-American Court of Human Rights explained in its Advisory Opinion on the climate emergency that one of the most fundamental obligations of states is not to contribute to irreversible environmental harm. This should logically translate, at a minimum, into an obligation to stop subsidising fossil fuel consumption and granting licences for oil exploration.
This opinion shows that while international law is rooted in imperial and capitalist histories, it contains emancipatory potential. By reinterpreting or contesting dominant legal norms, activists and scholars can expose contradictions in the capitalist global order and push for more just alternatives.
AWC: Isn’t it doomed to preserve the architecture of crisis management and market solutions?
Margaretha Wewerinke-Singh (MW): It is doomed if we leave that architecture intact, but the past few years have opened a different path. International courts have begun to say, in plain terms, that governments must stop causing harm, not merely manage the fallout. Christina already mentioned the Inter-American Court’s recognition of a fundamental duty not to inflict irreversible environmental damage, which sits uneasily with new oil licences and fossil fuel subsidies.
This ruling did not come out of the blue, but reflects a much broader body of jurisprudence from courts around the world. Most recently, the International Court of Justice’s ruling, which Ingo highlighted, explicitly confirmed that fossil fuel production, licensing, and subsidizing can constitute a wrongful act under international law, triggering obligations of cessation—in other words, to stop causing harm—and reparation. Moves like these push us away from delay and toward immediate phase-out, prevention, and repair.
These steps ultimately require a complete overhaul of the system. The title of Progressive International’s briefing following the ICJ’s ruling is telling: “Capitalism is illegal. A historic ICJ ruling confirms it: fossil-fuel capitalism violates international law”. To be sure, the judges did not use those exact words. But they did speak in terms of “reparations”, which gives activists and advocates much to work with.
AWC: How do you see the role of legal scholars and institutions in a world where ecological collapse is not a forecast but a condition of the present?
CE: The scale of the present emergency only increases the need for legal engagement. The problem lies primarily in short-sighted politics governed by immediate economic concerns. We need frameworks that allow us to think and act long-term, accounting for both present and future necessities.
The KlimaSeniorinnen decision of the European Court of Human Rights underscored, more than any previous judgment, the need for national climate policy to be grounded in science. It is now for high-emitting European states to put this into practice, and for international, regional, and national institutions—as well as scholars—to follow this process and hold them accountable.
Another crucial aspect to develop is how to account for the cost of inaction. At present, legal debates focus on responsibilities for past damage and future action. When future impacts are considered, the conversation usually centers on steep emission reduction measures and their restrictions on freedoms. What we need are ways to legally capture the costs of certain current and future climate impacts—economic as well as human—and weigh them in the legal balancing of interests.
IV: I fully agree and would add one bit of nuance: as an academic, I see an additional role for myself in exposing the law as part of the problem, even if I don’t immediately know what to do about it. Anyone who operates within the legal system is, in one way or another, obliged to provide answers. That is different for academics, who have the freedom to research, think, and analyze without the immediate need for their research to be operational. That is part of their function in society—a crucial point to uphold, especially when times are so urgent.
AWC: What does “neutrality” mean in this context?
MWS: Neutrality cannot mean sitting on the fence while harm continues. If we are serious about evidence and basic rights, “neutrality” means telling the truth about what the science requires and who bears responsibility. Europe’s human rights court has already said, in its 2024 KlimaSeniorinnen v. Switzerland ruling, that governments must protect people from the serious risks of climate change. It faulted Switzerland for lacking a science-based plan. Being neutral between a proven risk and proven measures is not neutrality; it is abdication. Whether academics focus on diagnosis or solutions, a commitment to truth and integrity is essential.
AWC: Suppose artists, jurists, and citizens came together to write a radical law—rooted in ecological protection, anti-displacement, and historical reparations. What legal, political, and strategic limits would such a law face within the current legal order?
IV: Many grassroots activities struggle with issues of scale. What works well for a small community becomes shakier when it expands and becomes more institutionalized, even legalized. At some point, relationships with that strange animal called “the state” and its law must be arranged and negotiated. How much of state-based law can be co-opted, and how much must be kept at arm’s length?
I say this against the background of a state-based legal order that is, in many ways, extractive—in both capitalist and ecological senses. The challenge for any radical legal rewrite is how far it will engage with state-based law. It is a classic dilemma in progressive struggle: how much do you give in?
AWC: Can cities such as Amsterdam claim climate and housing justice beyond their delegated powers?
MWS: Cities are not powerless. Within national frameworks, they can protect homes from speculation, require actual occupancy, and expand truly public housing. They can use public procurement to prefer builders and suppliers who respect human rights and cut emissions under EU rules—shifting markets without waiting for national reforms. And where higher law blocks fair outcomes, cities can litigate, legislate within their remit, and build coalitions with other municipalities to change the rules.
This is already happening. The Dutch “nitrogen crisis” shows the stakes: the courts struck down a lax permitting system, but the answer cannot be to freeze social housing indefinitely; it must include cutting the largest sources of nitrogen pollution while prioritizing projects with clear public value. Law gives cities more room than they often claim; justice asks them to use it.
AWC: What tools—legal or otherwise—can be mobilized to decolonize space, reclaim housing, or abolish extractivist urban planning?
MW: Start by loosening property’s grip on everything. Community land trusts separate land from the market so homes remain affordable and under democratic control. They already work at scale [as seen] in cities like Brussels. Brazil’s City Statute gives cities tools—participatory planning, duties attached to property, and targeted taxes—to put use-value above speculation.
In places shaped by settler colonialism, free, prior, and informed consent should be a baseline for any major project affecting Indigenous lands or ways of life. Scotland’s “community right to buy” shows how law can transfer strategic assets into community hands for restoration and housing. None of this is exotic. It is a practical toolkit for care, repair, and shared stewardship.
CE: We need massive social housing investment based on public good, not market logic—ideally through public housing expansion and decommodification, with strong participation of local communities. This would likely also require building new homes.
In the Dutch context, however, where building permits are scarce because construction worsens our massive nitrogen problem, investment in new social housing would have to go hand in hand with seriously reducing the animal farming industry—the greatest contributor to the nitrogen crisis.
IV: Last year, we began a new research collaboration at the University of Amsterdam focused on “Decolonial Futures”. We explore the role of law across multiple fields: museums, archives, and cultural practices; migration, mobility, and borders; and ecology, sustainability, and climate change.
There are many ways in which law can be mobilized to support struggles for redress and repair. But it is also important to see clearly how the law shields certain actors from such claims and may even perpetuate colonial injustices. I am sure we’ll return to that point.
AWC: Now that laws often protect polluters more than people, could fictional or performative legal texts become tools for civic education, resistance, or healing?
IV: Challenge accepted. We should cherish that part of our freedom in research and teaching much more. We sometimes do, but not enough. To rephrase a point I made earlier: how much distance do you take? Or do you give in—just a little, or more—to engage existing legal structures in an attempt to transform them? Reality has a strong pull.
Fiction and performance—ecological utopias, for instance—can stabilize long-term horizons so that progressive struggles avoid the pitfalls of reformism.
CE: In education, we have the freedom to engage with fictional legal texts, but we seldom use it. If we shifted communication toward the functions of law rather than the law itself, we could rely more strongly on fictional texts—e.g., mock constitutions, people’s tribunals—to expose how law creates realities, whom it serves, and what it suppresses.
We could allow ourselves and others to playfully and critically deploy the legal form, to better understand how power structures are built and maintained, how legal language obscures violence or grants legitimacy, and what radically different alternatives may be possible.
AWC: What would it take for international legal education to make space for such radical imaginaries—where law is not merely interpreted or applied, but re-invented as a creative and collective act?
CE: As a starting point, this would require highlighting law’s role in shaping the world, not merely reflecting it. This challenges the traditional way of teaching law as a neutral, technical field. Instead, law must be understood as a site of struggle, imagination, and power. To some extent, this is already part of research and teaching in International and European Law at the University of Amsterdam—but it would need to extend into all fields, including tax, property, and company law.
A further step would be to incorporate non-Western legal traditions, Indigenous jurisprudence, and Global South perspectives.
AWC: What legal strategies exist—or should exist—to hold climate criminals accountable, especially when they act through multinational anonymity and diplomatic immunity?
IV: Much of the destruction of the planet—through greenhouse gas emissions and otherwise—has not only been immensely lucrative, but also, at first glance, legal. This is especially the case for emissions from private actors. But states are under an obligation of due diligence in the context of the climate crisis. That means they must take measures to prevent harm to the climate system, including harm caused by private industry. It is crucial to foreground and uphold states’ obligations to make harmful activities—above all, fossil fuel extraction and production—illegal.
There is also another legal strategy that turns to private law. For example, the German Higher Regional Court of Hamm upheld a lawsuit by a Peruvian farmer against the energy giant RWE. The court found that threats of damage to property caused by RWE’s contribution to global warming could render RWE liable, even if its emissions were, per se, legal.
AWC: Could there be a role for legal speech that does not demand enforcement but instead mobilizes memory—naming those responsible through rituals of public grief and rage?
MWS: Yes—because stories can move a public before statutes do. People’s tribunals and other civic forums don’t issue binding orders, but they create records, name patterns of harm, and keep memory alive. The Russell Tribunal on Vietnam did this in the 1960s. Today, Rights of Nature Tribunals gather testimony and draft judgments that can later feed litigation, policy, and divestment.
These rituals don’t replace courts or formal proceedings. They prepare the ground for them—and for politics—by refusing erasure. In a system that too often shields polluters, this kind of speech is not a sideshow. It builds the moral and imaginative authority that law will eventually have to embody.
AWC: What would a “law of the commons” look like if it were written by those who live with the consequences of ecological injustice—rather than those who manage its profitability?
CE: A “law of the commons” would have to shift from a structure of individual rights to a structure of collective responsibilities—placing care for nature and for others at the center. It would remind us that nature is not here to serve our interests, but that we are part of nature, and that life is inseparable from it. Such a law would be grounded in the understanding that ethics are relational.
It would have to account not only for those alive today, but also for future generations; not only for urban populations, but also for farmers; not only for preservation, but for the regeneration of nature itself, alongside hu§man interaction with nature and with one another.
IV: Amen. I would add an emphasis on the strong asymmetry between those who have contributed most to the climate crisis and those who suffer most from it. These asymmetries map onto racial, gender, and class divides, as well as geographic ones. A law of the commons would have to undo such patterns of domination, and it would need to rest on some form of reparation and atonement.
MWS: Fully agreed on all counts. Those most affected would set the terms: Indigenous peoples deciding on regeneration and repair of their lands; local communities co-governing energy, water, and housing; time measured in generations, not financial quarters.
We already have parts of this in practice. Indigenous jurisprudence recognizes relationships, not just transactions; commons scholarship shows how communities can steward shared resources without market or state monopolies; and some constitutions now recognize the rights of nature itself, building on Indigenous practices. Recognizing the sovereignty and rights of these communities is a logical first step toward a “law of the commons”.
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- Image credits
Cover: Nairy Baghramian, Beliebte Stellen, 2017; bronze, paint, zinc-coated steel, rubber; installation view Skulptur Projekte Münster 2017, Münster, Germany; photograph Benjamin Westoby. Courtesy and copyright of the artist.
