Climate Litigation
Understanding the Just Transition through the lenses of Wellbeing, Justice, and Equity
Funding
Professor Christina Eckes is part of the team that has been awarded funding for a new, interdisciplinary cross-faculty research exploring the energy transition from the perspective of ecological integrity, well-being, and climate justice.
The lead applicant is Dr. Matteo Fermeglia (Faculty of Humanities) and the co-applicants are Dr. Colin Hickey (Faculty of Sciences); Dr. Aslin Unan (Faculty of Humanities) and Prof. Christina Eckes (Faculty of Law).
About the project
The project will investigate the concept of just transition as understood and applied in both South African and European policies from the perspective of its intersections with ecological integrity and well-being, as well as its implications for climate justice and litigation. It will engage with the complexities rooted in the need to provide access to energy, whilst ensuring human health and wellbeing inherently bound up with ecological wellbeing both in the Global North and Global South.
The academic disciplines will interact in the following way:
- The Law and Policy team (Fermeglia and Eckes) will analyse how conceptions of justice undergird the arguments and choices by parties, policy-makers and judges in just transition policies and litigation.
- The Ethics team (Hickey) will scrutinize the ethical assumptions behind the concept of justice being deployed (implicitly and explicitly) across Just Energy Transition Partnerships, assessing the strengths and limitations of such conceptualization.
- The Political Science team (Unan) will analyze policy trade-offs between SDGs from a North-South perspective, considering stakeholder views to understand how just transition policies intersect with political processes and social inequalities.
On this basis, the project provides a law, political science and ethics framework to investigate to what extent just transition policies embrace or resist neoliberal capitalism and a fossil fuel-driven economy. Finally, it aims to formulate innovative policy suggestions better suited to the complexity of the issues at stake.
About ENLENS
ENLENS (Energy transition through the lens of Sustainable Developments Goals) is a new research priority area at the University of Amsterdam. The aim of ENLENS is to stimulate and initiate interdisciplinary cross-faculty research that maps the energy transition in the Netherlands and Europe against the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) beyond the Dutch and European borders with special focus on trade-offs and synergies.
