Lisa Vanhala's research while affiliated with University College London and other places
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Publications (18)
The mobilization of law to address the degradation of the environment implicates a wide range of institutions, actors, and materials. This article maps developments in the study of environmental legal mobilization. It examines the different theoretical approaches that account for why and how groups mobilize the law (or do not), including explanatio...
Different ways of framing the nexus between climate change and migration have been advanced in academic, advocacy and policy circles. Some understand it as a state-security issue, some take a protection (or human security) approach and yet others portray migration as an adaptation or climate risk management strategy. Yet we have little insight into...
The Warsaw International Mechanism for Loss and Damage Associated with Climate Change Impacts (WIM) was established in 2013, and its Executive Committee (ExCom) is developing a new five-year workplan. Seizing this opportune moment to assess institutional progress on the issue of loss and damage under the United Nations Framework Convention on Clima...
What can an “ethnographic sensibility” contribute to research on climate change governance? With its emphasis on meaning making and understanding what may lie beneath more obvious interactions and processes, ethnographic methodologies, particularly collaborative event ethnography, are increasingly deployed to address complex questions and achieve c...
Loss and damage (L&D) is now a key area of climate policy. Yet studies of L&D governance have focused disproportionately on the international level while the national scale of analysis has been overlooked. Recent developments in the UNFCCC negotiations and a growing call for a ‘science of loss’ that can support policy-makers to address L&D suggest...
Whilst the international politics of climate change-related loss and damage has received growing scholarly attention, there has been less focus on national level policy responses. This is puzzling because climate change impacts are inherently local and political. What knowledge and ideas do policy actors at the national level use to conceptualise t...
The Warsaw International Mechanism for Loss and Damage (L&D) associated with Climate Change Impacts (WIM) was established in 2013 to advance i) knowledge generation; ii) coordination and iii) support to address losses and damages under the UNFCCC. So far, the work undertaken by the WIM Executive Committee (ExCom) has focused on enhancing understand...
Applying insights from science and technology studies about the “coproduction” of science and sociopolitical order to research on legal mobilization yields important theoretical insights. Using the polar bear petition campaign by the Center for Biological Diversity as an illustrative case, this article shows how this protracted legal campaign aroun...
This chapter provides a commentary of Article 8 of the Paris Agreement focusing on loss and damage associated with climate change impacts.
This is a draft chapter. The final version will be available in "Commentary on the Paris Agreement" edited by Leonie Reins and Geert van Calster, forthcoming 2020, Edward Elgar Publishing Ltd.
The material cann...
Studies of climate change litigation have proliferated over the past two decades, as lawsuits across the world increasingly bring policy debates about climate change mitigation and adaptation, as well as climate change‐related loss and damage to the attention of courts. We systematically identify 130 articles on climate change litigation published...
Practitioners and scholars have argued that mobilizing the law can play a crucial role in translating human rights principles into transformative changes for rights holders. However, we have only a relatively embryonic understanding of the full range of mechanisms by which strategic legal action might lead to change and the conditions under which i...
Research on legal opportunity structures has focused on how existing law, standing rules, and the costs of litigation shape the likelihood that social movement groups will mobilize the law. Yet there has been relatively little research to show why and how legal opportunity structures change over time. This paper focuses on a case study of the mobil...
This article surveys the use of process tracing as a method in research on global and comparative environmental politics. It reveals that scholars have been reluctant to explicitly embrace the method, even though a great deal of environmental politics research relies on process tracing and studies causal mechanisms. I argue that the growing number...
Citations
... It has three expert groups which respectively cover slow onset events, non-economic losses and action and support; a technical expert group on comprehensive risk management; and a task force on displacement (UNFCCC n.d.-a). However, recent research has shown that there were significant delays in establishing these groups which were each established at different times and some workstreams have progressed more than others (Johansson et al. 2022 Parties agreed in Madrid that further work is needed to effectively operationalise the functions of the WIM. This included the establishment of the WIM ExCom expert group on action and support, and the Santiago Network which was established to catalyse technical assistance for the implementation of approaches at the local, national and regional level in developing countries. ...
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... Additionally, these policies not only aim to reduce vulnerability at the local level but are also aligned with international frameworks such as the Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction 2015-2030, Paris Agreement on Climate Change 2015, and the Sustainable Development Agenda 2015-2030. Similar to the findings of this research, a recent study by Calliari and Vanhala (2022) highlighted that climate change L&D governance at the national level is influenced by action at regional and international levels. The findings also reveal that the national policy landscape in the context of L&D is scarce with no specific L&D policy and mechanisms to address L&D at the national. ...
... However, another paragraph indicates that the global stocktake 'will consider information' related to loss and damage (UNFCCC, 2018, p. 57). In light of this wording, and since the Paris Agreement includes one article (Article 8) devoted exclusively to loss and damage, it seems sensible to expect that the global stocktake will incorporate loss and damage (Calliari et al., 2021). ...
Reference: Loss and damage in the global stocktake
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... A major gap in L&D scholarship is attributed to a poor understanding of how national institutions are dealing with L&D policy and decision-making. Very few studies have examined L&D governance at the national scale Benjamin 2018a, 2018b;Vanhala, Robertson, and Calliari 2021). Given this context, this study aims to examine L&D governance with an emphasis on policy gaps, capacity constraints, availability of data, and access to climate finance, particularly in Fiji's sugar industry, to avert, minimise, and address L&D from sudden and slow onset events. ...
... The issue of transfers from developed to developing regions, for example in the form of remittances from a migrated labour force, would also deserve further investigation. On a similar note, the development of the current work to include transfers from developed to developing regions could provide some insight into the debate on the complex relationship between Loss and Damage and adaptation governance (Calliari et al. 2020). The discussion is very politically sensitive and still controversial because it is not clear if Loss and Damage should be considered only within the adaptation framework or beyond it. ...
... Extreme weather and climate conditions, e.g., the 2003 or 2011 European heatwaves (Stott et al., 2004;Zhong et al., 2021), extreme rainfall from Hurricane Harvey in Texas, US, in 2017(Van Oldenborgh et al., 2017, and the extreme winter blackout in Texas, US, in 2021 (Busby et al., 2021), have raised major concerns about serious climate risks among scientists and various stakeholders over the last decades. Climate risk assessment is indispensable in many practical applications (Kharin et al., 2007;Kao and Ganguly, 2011;Ghosh et al., 2012) and is especially relevant in the context of climate change; see the International Panel on Climatic Change (IPCC) reports (Shukla et al., 2019;Masson-Delmotte et al., 2021) and the 2021 COP26 conference goals (Calliari et al., 2020). Recently, Chen et al. (2018) have emphasized the need to build resilient statistical models for analyzing climate extremes. ...
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... The third category of factors concerns legal opportunity structure, which represents the degree of accessibility of a legal system that allows individuals and interest groups to fulfill their social and political goals and tactics (Vanhala, 2012). Scholars generally agree that the available legal stock, the legal standing rules, and the rules on legal costs are determining factors of legal opportunity (e.g., Anderson, 2006;Hison, 2002;Vanhala, 2012Vanhala, , 2018Vanhala, , 2020. First, legal stock consists of the existing body of law and constraints on how social movement organizations can articulate their claims if they want to be successful in the courtroom (Anderson, 2006, pp. ...
... Assessing the effects and effectiveness of climate litigation remains a highly complex task (Bouwer, 2020;Setzer and Byrnes, 2020) and there are very different approaches to evaluate the success of environmental litigation (see Bothner et al., 2022). Contributing to the nascent research on the effects of climate litigation (Setzer and Vanhala, 2019;Setzer and Higham, 2022) and building on the first assessment, we further fleshed out the Social Plausibility Assessment Framework and the global opportunity structure as analytical tools to capture the societal embedding and effects of climate litigation. We also tested the analytical framework at a more fine-grained, case-specific level and applied it to two recent landmark decisions, Neubauer et al. v. Germany and Milieudefensie et al. v. Shell. ...
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... Regardless whether the focus was on democratic or authoritarian states, previous studies have adopted a descriptive and case-based approach to understand strategic litigation in legal mobilization (e.g., Anderson, 2006;Chua, 2014Chua, , 2019bTam, 2013;Vanhala, 2016Vanhala, , 2017Vanhala, , 2018. The research methods used before were mainly to identify the individual variables that increased or reduced the likelihood of environmental groups bringing issues to court. ...
... En términos epistemológicos, el rastreo de procesos es compatible como método con la tradición empirista/(post)positivista de las ciencias sociales (Checkel, 2008;Bennett y Checkel, 2015). No obstante, en vista de que George y Bennett (2005) incluyeron la narrativa detallada como la forma más simple de rastreo de proceso (sin hacer uso de teoría o variables), algunos autores como Vennesson (2008: 224) han insistido en que el rastreo de procesos tiene cabida tanto en estudios positivistas como interpretativistas (ver también Vanhala, 2017). En respuesta, otros como Blatter y Blume (2012: 81) se han inclinado por el uso de la etiqueta "rastreo causal del proceso" para incluir solamente aquellos estudios en los que la causalidad juega un papel importante en el tiempo y el espacio. ...
