Research
You will find a complete range of our monographs, muti-authored and edited works including peer-reviewed, original scholarly research across the social sciences and aligned disciplines. We publish long and short form research and you can browse the complete Bristol University Press and Policy Press archive.
Policy Press also publishes policy reviews and polemic work which aim to challenge policy and practice in certain fields. These books have a practitioner in mind and are practical, accessible in style, as well as being academically sound and referenced.
In South Africa litigation strategies have been used to challenge coal-fired power plants and their impacts – bringing to the fore, in some cases, climate change arguments. To date these strategies have been highly effective in South Africa at highlighting the harms of relying on coal power from a climate and health, as well as a human rights, perspective, and in stopping proposed new coal power projects. These strategies continue to be developed and could be relevant in the broader African, and global, context, in light of increasing plans for proliferation of fossil fuels throughout Africa. This chapter covers the legal and factual context in South Africa as a background to the legal strategies employed there. It discusses the specific cases used in South Africa to stop proposed new coal power projects and electricity plans; and to challenge government’s failure to act on the harms of coal power – all of which ultimately have climate-based outcomes. Finally it sets out key insights and lessons from these legal strategies, including their effectiveness at addressing climate change impacts and issues. The author bases these perspectives on her own experiences as a legal practitioner and attorney, working on climate and environmental public interest law in South Africa.
No cases specifically related to climate change have been brought before African regional human rights bodies. This chapter draws on African human rights norms, substantive rights protection by regional human rights bodies, as well as the procedural considerations of climate litigation before human rights bodies, to draw conclusions about the opportunities and challenges of litigating climate change before the African human rights system. The African system not only provides a robust system of substantive rights protection, but also provides flexible procedural requirements with broad standing to bring collective and public interest cases, and provides room for justification for lack of strict compliance with admissibility criteria. The African system has also developed unique norms that extend the protection of the human rights of specifically vulnerable groups, including indigenous people, refugees and children, as some of the groups most vulnerable to the impacts of climate change. The regional human rights bodies also have the mandate to interpret human rights as living instruments to which they have given purposive interpretation in ensuring that victims of human rights violations are not denied justice on the basis of too narrow or restrictive interpretations.
A new trend of climate litigation targeting private defendants – especially corporations – has gained momentum due to advances in attribution science and the legal discourse surrounding the responsibility of ‘carbon majors’. At the same time, rights-based arguments are seeing increasing success in litigation targeting governments who fail to take appropriate action to prevent climate change. This chapter explores the potential for rights-based actions against private entities, specifically on the African continent. It elucidates the significance of the horizontal application of an environmental right, both directly and indirectly, that enjoys firm judicial recognition in certain African jurisdictions. As a result, Africa is ripe for substantive engagement with environmental and associated rights and their application to private entities. More narrowly, this chapter investigates the constitutional milieu of the South African right to a healthy environment and its significant advantages for aligning private obligations with constitutional values, thus enabling new ways of pursuing private actor accountability for climate change. As a specific exemplar, it explores the nascent judicial practice of interpreting the nature and scope of directors’ common law and statutory duties through the prism of the Bill of Rights.
The duty to ‘protect’ human rights requires the state to adopt legislation, to provide effective remedies to protect right holders and to regulate non-state actors to ensure that their actions do not hinder the realization of right. Although significant, the duty to ‘protect’ rights is neither yet well-developed nor understood in the context of procedural hurdles that may challenge climate litigation. Using Nigeria as a case study, this chapter argues that due regard by every state to its duty to ‘protect’ human rights may help address procedural hurdles and thereby advance potential climate litigation for success in African countries. In making this argument, the chapter engages with the questions: What does a state duty to ‘protect’ rights mean for climate litigation? What are the difficult hurdles to climate litigation in the African context? How do existing frameworks address the hurdles? And how can the state duty to ‘protect’ rights advance the success of climate litigation. The chapter highlights necessary reforms to address legal obstacles to climate litigation.
This chapter has a conceptual and methodological orientation and engages with the question of the criteria that should be used to identify a case as climate litigation, or as climate relevant. It assumes that Africans need a climate litigation definition that will enable African actors to cognize, target and transform the governance institutions most critical to responding to the multi-faceted, severe and already manifesting climate change impacts on the continent. It argues that the visibility approach to identifying climate cases in mainstream climate litigation scholarship obscures cases that exhibit the tools governments are already using (or not using) to alleviate the impacts of climate change. The chapter proposes an alternative approach where climate risk features as the central criterion for case law selection. In developing a risk-thematic approach to identifying climate relevant case law, the chapter reviews recent scientific findings on Africa’s key risks to identify a set of keywords that could serve as climate risk criteria. By using these keywords to search an open access database of legal materials from southern Africa, the chapter demonstrates the extent of cases that could constitute the archive of African climate jurisprudence and commentary. Finally, the chapter illustrates the value of a risk-thematic approach to identifying climate-relevant cases by describing three drought litigation cases from South Africa, which brings the importance of governance tools relating to water restrictions and drought relief to the fore.
Indigenous peoples of the African continent, although victims of climate change, have accumulated Meteorological Traditional Knowledge (MTK) over generations and are ideally positioned to offer their expert MTK to the scientific community. MTK can contribute to climate change adaptation and mitigation. The sharing of MTK can be beneficial to all stakeholders and rights holders, and may be desired by indigenous peoples. However, MTK as an emerging sui generis resource is vulnerable to biopiracy and misappropriation, which mirrors generally the traditional knowledge of indigenous peoples. Additionally sharing can carry risks and can lead to cultural harm for indigenous peoples. This chapter seeks to identify legal avenues to preserve and equitably share the MTK of indigenous peoples, which will benefit humanity as a whole without causing cultural harm. In relation to the preservation of MTK the chapter proposes that the profile, vulnerability and value of MTK could be included in human rights protection under the African Charter. Strong land tenures would also protect the generational MTK of indigenous peoples. The chapter in particular examines recent case law involving semi-nomadic indigenous peoples, where MTK was at risk and very present in the submissions through ‘story telling’.
In the south of Ghana, so-called funeral banners are ubiquitous in public space. These large-scale posters printed on PVC give the faces of deceased community members a continued place among the living as well as a distinctly ‘modern’ feel and aesthetic. By looking at the materiality and contexts of these image-objects, that are used as advertisements and props in multiple ways during funerals and beyond, this chapter unpacks the functions that funeral banners have for the living. It traces their social lives and the ways in which material and visual qualities of funeral banners help to produce morally good kinds of death or respond to bad death appropriately. Ethnographic data from contemporary Ghana is brought in dialogue with the enduring influences of colonial history and shifting power relations. These continue to shape the ways in which the dead can remain integral parts of communities. Funeral banners may indexically help to recreate the dead in a social process of making death, and they may help to turn bad kinds of death into better, possibly good kinds. While serving to attract visitors to funerals, they also offer semi-permanent sites in which the dead may come to acquire ancestor status.
This concluding chapter connects the preceding chapters across four overarching themes. ‘Relational death’ emphasizes the inevitable socio-ecological relationalities involved in dying, death and deathcare. We draw attention to the relationalities among more-than-human bodies, their purposes and meanings, and their caretakers. ‘More-than-human bodies’ expands the scope of death studies to include nonhuman and non-organismic entities, while also situating the human corpse within ecological and material relations. ‘Purposes and meaning’ considers alternative possibilities by which the dead become meaningful or valuable to the living. We discuss emerging disposition technologies’ symbolic promises of continuation of the self beyond death. Death and the dead mean different things to other beings. Thus, we highlight death as a collective affair that becomes necessary for the continuation of lives, where meaning is not localized in the deaths of individuals but understood as integral to life beyond the bounded subject. ‘Norms and care’ elaborates on complex relationalities of community, care and labour that bind the living and the dead. We highlight the potentiality of materials to confirm and challenge notions of a good death as well as the inequalities that permeate the complex relationalities and communities of the living, dying and dead.
