Acceso usuarios
Katia Poneti
The climate question is complex and has the capacity to undermine the cognitive categories of politics and law. To analyze in a realistic way the meeting / clash between the climate question and the legal-political categories, I believe, is the first step towards identifying and legitimizing the social changes needed to face the problem. In this paper I analyze the answer given by the international institutions to the question of climate change, and I focus on the characteristics of climate governance: it is fragmented, polycentric, transnational, and gathers together a plurality of actors. I present the essential elements of the Paris Agreement, the most recent among the tools of climate governance, and analyse its contribution to that. I then try to give a reading of the governance that also includes the normative dimension, especially the rights and the courts; and I argue that both play an important role in the governance processes, which apparently seem to set them aside. I dedicate the final paragraphs to the description of the phenomenon of climate change litigation, and to some relevant jurisprudential cases, and above all to try to grasp their founding value, from the point of view of a realist philosophy of law. The activity of the courts, carried out on a global scale, can be seen as a laboratory in which the juridical tools to tackle climate change are built from a rights-based perspective.
