Transnational Environmental Law's Missing People

Natasha Affolder

doi:10.1017/s2047102519000190

Abstract

AbstractLegal scholars rely heavily on vocabularies of ‘actors’, ‘agents’, and ‘experts’ to account for the fact that law does not develop by itself. However, the identities, idiosyncrasies, and individual professional contributions of law'speopleare rarely illuminated. This article suggests that the relative absence of people in transnational legal scholarship helps to explain some of its gaps. The task of bringing ‘human actors back on stage’ creates some new opportunities for transnational environmental law scholarship. It invites attention to both dominant and excluded voices. It offers a way of bridging the gap between the bureaucratic language of law and its lived reality. It also provides an understanding of why, despite ferocious attempts to roll back the advances of environmental law in some places, many scholars and practitioners find reason to be optimistic about the future of environmental law.

Highlights

While accounts of environmental law’s travels and transformations contain a dizzying array of ‘actors’,1 ‘agents’,2 and ‘active players’,3 these same accounts include few actual people
This article suggests that the relative absence of people in transnational legal scholarship helps to explain some of its gaps
By failing to fit people into transnational accounts of environmental law’s creation and movement, we may be limiting our ability to deliver on the suggested ambitions of transnational environmental law. This is an early-stage, exploratory attempt to think about what might get lost in writing people out of accounts of transnational environmental law processes and what might be gained by including people in different ways in the wave of scholarship

Summary

Actors

Attention to the role of actors other than states in lawmaking is often considered a key contribution of the transnational law lens.[44]. The practice of attributing singular thoughts and motivations to non-human entities is evident in the way in which the ‘Global South’ is discussed as an actor able to ‘position itself’.55 It emerges through descriptions of how ‘the World Bank draws on the expertise of NGOs’.56. By separating out distinct users, demanders, and suppliers of indicators, a richer understanding of the subsets of ‘stakeholders’ emerges.[59] Thinking about indicators as the product of specific people, their expertise, their values, and their combined backgrounds highlights different dimensions of the knowledge problem that indicators produce and perpetuate This comes into view in Sally Engle Merry’s work, as she takes the time to trace the career paths and academic institutional affiliations of the creators of the Human Development Index in order to humanize the act of creating this tool.[60]. Contemplating the use of ethnography to illuminate transnational law’s actors, both groups and individuals, directs conscious attention to the choice of subject in transnational environmental law scholarship – a choice frequently obscured.[66]

Agents

Experts

Transnational Environmental Law as Revelation

Judges and the ‘Project’ of Environmental Law

Scholars and Teachers

Funders as Environmental Law’s Intermediaries