An Unknown Past, an Unequal Present, and an Uncertain Future: Transnational Environmental Law Through Three Research Challenges

Abstract

This chapter seeks to bring into focus three broad research challenges facing transnational environmental law – an unknown past, an unequal present, and an uncertain future. Transnational law theory invites scholars to stand at a distance from current orthodoxies and to contemplate environmental law and its practice from new vantage points. The study of transnational environmental law thus prompts new ways of thinking about where to look for environmental law and its foundational influences. New research agendas emerge organically from such shifts of gaze. By identifying future research agendas, we can illuminate both the diversity of sites of past and present lawmaking and the plurality of ideas that shape concepts of the ‘environment’ and ‘environmentalisms’. These new imaginative spaces are central to understanding law’s roles in a global context – the roads taken and so far not taken.