Taking Climate Change to Court. A Case Study of the Legal Mobilisation Process of Norway’s First Climate Change Litigation Case

As a way to slow down global warming and prevent damaging climate change, activists are increasingly turning to the courts. This growing trend of climate change litigation marks a radical shift in the strategies of many civil society actors, as they expand their battles from the political realm into the legal one. Yet, we still know little about this changing battlefield. Why and how are civil society actors adopting litigation as a strategy to address climate change? Through a case study of Norway’s first climate litigation case, People v Arctic Oil, with a specific focus on the plaintiffs, Greenpeace Nordic and Nature and Youth, this thesis adopts an interpretative approach to examine the decision to initiate litigation. Based on empirical data obtained from interviews with key actors in the legal mobilisation process and a judge, complemented by secondary data, the analysis identifies factors that influenced the adoption of litigation as a strategy for addressing climate change matters. The findings suggest that the Norwegian environmental movement faced limited opportunities to influence petroleum policy, primarily due to a lack of political receptiveness towards their demands to cease further petroleum exploration on the Norwegian shelf. This, in combination with the relatively open rules governing legal standing in Norway, as well as the expansion of the environmental movement’s legal and cultural stock following the revision of the Norwegian Constitution Article 112 (the environmental provision), the adoption of the Paris Agreement, and the increase in climate change litigation cases globally, were understood as factors facilitating litigation. On the other hand, the main barriers to litigation were the high and unpredictable cost of litigation along with the quite conservative nature of Norwegian courts. These different factors were classified into two categories: opportunity structure explanations and organisation-level explanations. The analysis suggested that the identified factors not only influenced the decision to pursue litigation but also shaped the form of the litigation case. Overall, the thesis demonstrates the dynamic relationship between the different explanation factors and argues that an interpretative, bottom-up approach that considers both opportunity structure explanations and organisation-level explanations is needed to fully grasp the dynamics of a legal mobilisation process.