Abstract
There is an urgency to address societal challenges due to earth's environmental crisis and its capacity to sustain human well-being. In this context, ‘transformations towards sustainability’ move to centre-stage and are increasingly institutionalised within global scientific and policy discourses. Sustainability transformations involve reorientation and restructuring of governance processes and actions. Though the governance of transformation involves multiple actors, this article examines the role of the judiciary in steering a transformation process towards a sustainable and equitable future. Judicial intervention, as a strategic tool, can effect change in human action thereby enabling transformative changes. Drawing on social science literature, the article offers a novel interdisciplinary analysis of illustrative Indian climate change legal decisions located within the sustainability transformations discourse underpinned by the environmental rule of law. The Indian judiciary, noted for expansive thinking, and acting as a ‘lever of transformation’, is slowly addressing climate cases. These cases categorised as – climate conscious, climate accountability and climate futurity – reflect progressive cumulative outcomes, albeit incremental, but they nevertheless enable conditions for transformative change.
Highlights
There is an urgent need to respond to societal challenges due to earth’s environmental crisis and its capacity to sustain human well-being
The 2021 United Nation Environment Programme (UNEP) Report states system-wide transformation is the key to a sustainable future
We are increasingly aware of potentially irreparable consequences due to climate change and are developing appropriate transformations to sustainability responses
Summary
There is an urgent need to respond to societal challenges due to earth’s environmental crisis and its capacity to sustain human well-being. These include achieving good life and well-being, sustainable consumption and production patterns, values of responsibility, decarbonisation, externalities, reduced inequalities and technological innovation.53 In this context, the judiciary acts as a proactive and incremental facilitator in actioning the environmental rule of law to further transformational sustainability. Chief Justice Brian Preston argues as an independent and critical pillar of the government the judiciary can contribute in at least nine ways to solving the problem of climate change.59 These include ‘providing equal access to justice; determining and not deferring climate change claims; upholding the rule of law; taking and forcing the executive, legislature and private sector to take climate change seriously; explaining and upholding the fundamental values underpinning the law; promoting environmental values and putting a price on them; assisting the progressive and principled development of climate change law and policy; and making reasoned and evidence-based decisions’.60. Ministry of Environment, Forest and Climate Change (Government of India), India: Second Biennial Update Report to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (MoEFCC 2018) 228
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