Abstract
Applying insights from science and technology studies about the “coproduction” of science and sociopolitical order to research on legal mobilization yields important theoretical insights. Using the polar bear petition campaign by the Center for Biological Diversity as an illustrative case, this article shows how this protracted legal campaign around protection of the polar bear and its habitat opened up new legal opportunities for those advocating for the regulation of carbon emissions, mandated state‐sponsored generation of climate science, legally constructed the polar bear as “endangered,” and helped to shape the priorities of the nongovernmental organization itself.
Highlights
It is abundantly clear that national courts are one arena in which battles about policy responses to climate change are being waged (Burns and Osofsky 2009; Marshall and Sterett 2019; Setzer and Vanhala 2019)
All of this suggests that with a strong legal basis, a law that opened up the legal opportunity structure (LOS) for challenges, financial resources that could be mobilized for litigation, and an organizational identity that was rooted in the use of the law, the foundation for legal mobilization on the part of the Center for Biological Diversity (CBD) was obviously present
When that literature started to come out, that’s when we looked at it and put together the listing petition to list the polar bear as endangered under the Endangered Species Act. (Interview, CBD, November 16, 2015)
Summary
It is abundantly clear that national courts are one arena in which battles about policy responses to climate change are being waged (Burns and Osofsky 2009; Marshall and Sterett 2019; Setzer and Vanhala 2019) Legal cases such as the 2007 US Supreme Court decision in Massachusetts v EPA, in which a number of US states and several cites brought suit against the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to force the agency to regulate greenhouse gases as a pollutant, and the Urgenda (2015) decision in the Netherlands in which the Urgenda Foundation won a legal case to compel the state to take more effective action to address climate change, are just two examples among myriad high-profile litigation campaigns. The discussion and conclusion sections link the theoretical insights with the empirical analysis and lay a path for future research
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