Environmental Law and Narratology

Having experienced a spectacular rise over the past decade and a half, climate litigation remains in the spotlight of legal practice—at the domestic, international, and transnational levels alike. Together with related developments in the legislative and treaty-making domains, this has led to a blossoming of scholarship dealing with environmental law. In turn, this has ushered in a rise of novel approaches to the study of these questions, often adopting an interdisciplinary outlook.

A most promising, yet relatively unexplored vantage point is provided by the cross-fertilisation between (environmental) law and narratology. Narratology studies the construction of inchoate materials into structured narratives, allowing the attribution and communication of meaning. By assembling narratives, humans interpretively make sense of the world and their experience of the world, and convey the meaning so construed to other subjects. This involves potent ordering choices based on several spoken and unspoken presuppositions, which lend themselves to critical inquiry.

Thrown into relief by the law and literature movement, the intersection between law and narratology remains underresearched in respect of environmental questions. Yet, precisely the prominence of environmental issues in the public discourse makes narratological approaches extremely promising. Legal acts, ranging from judicial pronouncements to law-making instruments, inescapably construe narratives on the social phenomena they address. By attributing meaning to those phenomena, legal acts reinforce certain assumptions to the expense of competing interpretations. In so doing, they allocate uneven discursive legitimacy onto a variety of actors—creating momentum for certain causes and marginalising others; furthering certain courses of action while undermining others. Environmental law is no exception. Whether upon adjudicating the environmental obligations of States and/or corporations, sanctioning or acquitting environmental activists, or devising measures of adaptation to climate change, environmental law unavoidably creates and sustains (potentially conflicting) narratives of the problems it addresses. These narratives then structure further societal debates and, ultimately, action in the environmental field. Environmental law thereby provides a crucial, if still insufficiently explored contribution to the way in which public discourse on environmental and climate justice is shaped.

This webinar of the Max Planck Law Initiative on ‘Law, Climate Change, and the Environment’ brings together leading experts on the emerging field of narratological approaches to environmental law, in both the domestic and the international spheres. The event will show how narratology can provide a deeper understanding of environmental law, its potential, and its pitfalls.

Rashmi Dharia is a PhD candidate at Sciences Po Law School and Lecturer in law and literature at the American University in Paris. Her research draws analytical tools from narratology and literary criticism to study the figure of the reader in international law. Her project maps the reader as an embedded subject in international legal texts and studies the role of the reader as an invisible but crucial narrative figure that shapes and reproduces international legal discourse. Rashmi has a BSL.LLB from ILS Law College, Pune (India) and an LLM cum laude in Public International Law from Leiden University (Netherlands). Prior to joining Sciences Po Law School, she worked at the International Criminal Court as part of the defence team in the Situation in the Republic of Côte d’Ivoire.

Grace Nosek is a sociolegal scholar focusing on climate change and democracy, as well as an author and a long-time community organizer. She holds a BA from Rice University, a law degree from Harvard Law School, and a Master of Laws and PhD in law from the University of British Columbia. Grace is the author of a number of publications approaching issues of climate misinformation, protest, and democracy from an interdisciplinary perspective. Her research has been supported by a Fulbright Canada fellowship, a Pierre Elliott Trudeau Foundation scholarship and a Killam doctoral scholarship, among others. She was granted a public scholarship to turn her PhD thesis into a young adult fantasy novel on climate activism: Rootbound, published in 2024. As an author, Grace has spoken to thousands of people about how to spot climate misinformation and reclaim public agency in climate decision-making.

Anne Saab joined the Graduate Institute as an Assistant Professor in International Law in 2015 and was promoted to Associate Professor in 2021. She served as (co-)director of the LLM in International Law programme from 2018 to 2025. Anne obtained a PhD in International Law from the London School of Economics in 2015, an LLM from King’s College London in 2009, and an LLB from Leiden University in 2008. Her areas of interest and expertise include food and agriculture, climate change, intellectual property law and more recently, emotions and international law. Her first monograph entitled, Narratives of Hunger in International Law: Feeding the World in Times of Climate Change, was published by Cambridge University Press in 2019. Anne is currently working on a Swiss National Science Foundation (SNF)-funded project on ‘Emotions and International Law’, and a book with the same title is under contract with Oxford University Press. Prior to entering academia, Anne worked as a legal advisor and policy officer at the Ministry of Agriculture and Economic Affairs and at the Foreign Office in The Hague.