This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) and the copyright owner(s) are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
In a rapidly warming world, civil society is increasingly turning to courts to pursue climate justice and land rights. Against the background of this “rights turn,” this article explores the intersections of legal processes, artistic research, and policy frameworks and their repercussions for exposing environmental destruction and ecocide in legal contexts. We consider how artists have engaged with law by proposing alternative forums as a form of institutional critique and the rise of artistic research as investigative practice, before arguing that new investigative methodologies and spatial frameworks are urgently needed to pursue climate justice through the courts. By way of example, we introduce the “Climate Rights” project, which demonstrates how arts-driven visual and spatial analysis and participatory methods can be put to work in assisting frontline communities–most recently, in cases fighting “green colonialism” in Sápmi. In contextualising this work, we point to how the climate-culture-policy nexus of the green transition in Europe might actually undermine the territorial and cultural rights of minority and Indigenous communities. Our position is to advocate for collective work, as well as progressive climate policies, that will prioritises environmental justice over the neoliberalisation of nature and ensure accountability for climate action.
On 22 December 2020, the Norwegian Supreme Court ruled on its first climate case by dismissing the claim brought by six young Norwegians and several non-governmental organisations (NGOs) that oil licences issued by the Norwegian government would violate their constitutional right to a healthy environment. In 2021, the climate activists took their case to the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR), where it was adjourned pending the rulings on other similar cases. In 2024, the Norwegian youths’ case was found to be inadmissible, but, in another case brought by an association of older Swiss women, the court found that Switzerland had failed to comply with its duties under the European Convention on Human Rights concerning climate change, setting an important precedent.
Norway’s first climate case–in which the court effectively sided with the government’s policy of unfettered petroleum extraction–describes the challenge explored in this article (
Climate change–understood as the destabilisation of the Earth system under capitalism and its resulting effects, such as sea-level rise and the intensification of extreme weather–deepens the inequalities of environmental destruction. At the same time, climate mitigation approaches are opening new vectors of injustice by undermining the land rights of minority and Indigenous communities. If we are to pursue accountability both inside and outside courts, how do we document and design effective evidence? And whose expertise and what tools do we need to do so? All of this is to ask the question: what constitutes evidence in emerging legal forums for the pursuit of climate justice?
In this article, we argue artistic research can create impact by exposing accountability gaps and investigating under-reported cases of environmental destruction and ecocide. Within this article, “ecocide,” or crimes against the environment, is understood to be the actions and policies by powerful states and corporations that knowingly constitute severe, widespread or long-term environmental destruction. We first consider how artists and artist collectives have critically intervened within the form of the legal forum to highlight the shortcomings of political processes, make justice more accessible, and drive progressive policies. In particular, we consider those initiating citizen’s tribunals on environmental concerns. We then consider the ‘rights turn’ in climate litigation and a conceptual framework, between theory and practice, for designing evidence for climate justice in the context of contemporary investigative practice. Finally, we interrogate a key piece of the EU’s the climate-culture-policy nexus–particularly in the context of the European Green Deal.
In courtrooms, judicial hierarchies and traditions are reinforced by architecture. This includes placing the judges’ bench higher than all others in the courtroom and the architecture of the dock (
Kiley’s provisions were as impactful as the trials themselves, influencing future international tribunals and domestic trials (
Artists have long engaged with the court or tribunal form (
In 1934, outraged by Salvador Dalí’s inclusion of a swastika in a recent painting, surrealist leader André Breton initiated a kind of court in which Dalí was to defend himself. The artist appeared in seven sweaters with a thermometer in his mouth, progressively taking off his clothes, mocking the proceedings. In 1998, the Lunatic Offensive staged the “Foucault Tribunal” in Berlin, demanding to establish a ‘new concept for madness’, which would counter the destructiveness and arbitrariness of psychiatry as it had hitherto been theorised and practiced (
More recently, in 2016, the Berlin-based artists’ group Haus Bartleby launched the Capitalism Tribunal, at brut wien, a gallery in Vienna. Asking whether capitalism itself was a crime, the tribunal allowed the public to make charges via an online form, yielding 400 in total. A year later, activists and individuals organised another tribunal at the Schauspiel Köln theatre, alleging crimes committed by the so-called National Socialist Underground (NSU). While ‘symbolic’, the tribunal nonetheless considered itself “shed[ding] light” on a juridical blindspot in Germany (
Artists have also turned to interrogating the role of law in addressing climate change. One recent example of an alternative climate tribunal is the “Court for Intergenerational Climate Crimes,” first organised by the legal scholar Radha d’Souza and artist Jonas Staal in Amsterdam in 2021 and subsequently held at other locations around the world. In this court, conceived as an ‘embodied performative work’, the public was asked to form both a jury and to perform as witnesses (
The impact of artistic research also lies in critically engaging
This kind of spatial activism is given urgency by the fact that the massive uptick in publicly available data is attended by the spread of mis- and disinformation, which dramatically outpaces jurisprudence. As a counter-form of representation, it also demands fluency with new technology. Artists working with technology have a rich history going back to the 1960s (
Across the globe, civil society is increasingly bringing climate cases from below, by which we mean by via grassroots organisations, local communities and organisers, and people from marginalised groups, including Indigenous groups and communities from across the Global South (
The arts-driven Climate Rights project is funded by the Norwegian Research Council and situated at the Trondheim Academy of Fine Art (NTNU). The project situates climate cases in an interdisciplinary context that goes beyond a singular focus on human rights to one that is complementary to the Earth sciences and law, which have dominated climate change discourse and policy. This includes combining the approaches afforded by spatial disciplines, political ecology and climate science to critically address the interconnected questions of responsibility, causality, and legibility. Methodologically, the project shares much with the broader Investigative Commons, even as it develops its own strategies and techniques suited to represent the evidentiary breadth of climate cases. For example, the project recently made novel use of a Gaussian splat–a new form of 3D visualisation comparable but distinct from photogrammetry–to spatially contextualise still and video material from a field expedition.
What is the ethical case for civil society organisations leveraging their human rights in the fight against climate change? Responsibility describes the challenge that governments around the world are failing to achieve climate policy goals that meet the needs of the world’s most vulnerable (
In which ways does climate change challenge the attribution of causality? In legal contexts, it is usually the direct causation between cause and effect, or victim or perpetrator, that counts. However, environmental damage related to climate change requires us to broaden the nature of causality from a linear cascade of events into a force-field operating across multiple scales of times, space, and history and a plurality of actors.
What is the role of legibility in making climate rights violations more adjudicable? Visuality has played a transformative role at almost every stage in the emergence of scientific discourse and its dissemination–that is to say, its acceptance (
Following these three interconnected and multilayered lines of inquiry has led us to develop an expanded, spatial framework of artistic research. This framework opens new aesthetic, technological and political imaginaries that can deal with the transversal violence of climate change; deepens the understanding of accountability and evidence; and reframes climate cases beyond conventional human rights and jurisdictional frameworks. The Climate Rights project has used this framework to conduct a series of investigations, publish across online platforms and exhibitions, and operate both inside and beyond the courtroom. Its interdisciplinary team is using a novel combination of arts-driven visual and spatial analysis, fieldwork, and is working in close cooperation with impacted communities. The project is also engaging with Indigenous knowledge and the emerging field of attribution science to reconceptualise the ways in which scientific evidence and ecological knowledge of environmental destruction are produced, represented, and contested.
Below, we report on an ongoing legal case and the Climate Rights project in action. This case demonstrates how arts-driven visual and spatial analysis can assist frontline communities in the fight to protect their territorial and cultural rights.
Øyfjellet Wind Energy is located in Jillen-Njaarke, a reindeer herding community in Vefsn municipality, in Southern Sámi, in Helgeland in Nordland county. This area is both in Norway and in Sápmi, the land of the Sámi spanning parts of Norway, Sweden, Finland and Russia. Norway’s largest onshore wind energy project, with 72 wind turbines and more than 70 km of roads across 40 square kilometres, Øyfjellet occupies a crucial reindeer migration route and winter grazing area. Jillen-Njaarke brought legal action against Øyfjellet Wind as they never consented to the wind turbines being built on their ancestral land.
Øyfjellet Wind has enjoyed the direct support of the Norwegian state during the protracted legal process. The government granted operating licence to the company through a contested process of ‘corporate dialogue’ without Free, Prior, and Informed Consent (FPIC) (
Between 2023 and 2024, Climate Rights and INTERPRT–an environmental justice research agency, co-directed by Nabil Ahmed–assisted Jillen-Njaarke to review, interpret, analyse, and present visual and spatial evidence that could be used in their case. This investigation originally began as
To our knowledge, this was the first time a game-engine-driven 3D model had been used as part of the evidence on behalf of a frontline community in a climate and land rights legal case in a Norwegian court. We were also told by Jillen-Njaarke that they felt the presentation of scientific data took into account their perspective. The Sámi, like many other Indigenous communities, have the legitimate concern that their knowledge is not considered valid in legal-scientific contexts. This situation represents a policy paradox, as Indigenous knowledge holders are also crucial in the fight against climate change.
In 2020, Aili Keskitalo, former president of the Sámi parliament in Norway, described “green colonialism”: the process of the intensification of the colonial injustice of denying the Sámi, Europe’s only indigenous people, their ancestral land rights through the expansion of extractive projects justified by the climate crisis, a global process (
Øyfjellet Wind AS is owned by Aquila Capital, a German investment management company that ‘offers compelling investment opportunities that drive global decarbonisation’ (
Encoded in the project’s name is its ambition to be as transformative as the original Bauhaus of the 1930s, which saw the wide involvement of leading artists, architects, and designers exercise tremendous influence across disciplinary boundaries. However, that such a ‘movement’ should be initiated from the top down–as a policy–suggests a misreading of the original. Moreover, the NEB holds that architecture can be charged with the responsibility to deliver the EU’s carbon targets and that this work should not only be ‘sustainable, but also inclusive and beautiful’. Yet, architecture as a profession has never been so marginalised, its agency so captured by neoliberal capital, nor the field of aesthetics so contested and fragmented (
To understand how the EU undermines its own policy, we need only consider a parallel policy framework of the commision: the EU’s Critical Raw Minerals Act (CRMA), which entered into force in 2023. Designed to promote circularity and secure strategic raw minerals in the face of geopolitical risks, the CRMA does not explicitly recognize FPIC, a crucial right for Indigenous peoples. In fact, the CRMA raises significant concerns for the welfare of the Sámi people (
Nowhere are the policy challenges of advancing the green transition while balancing profit more entangled with preserving complex ecosystems (and as-yet unknown, more-than-human life) than in deep-sea mining, which involves extracting minerals from the ocean floor. Marine science and policy experts, international fisheries bodies, global businesses, the IUCN, governments, including 11 EU member states, and civil society have called for a moratorium or an outright ban. The European Commission itself says it advocates for prohibiting deep-sea mining (
The NEB’s concept paper, written by members of the high-level roundtable of ‘advanced thinkers and practitioners’, offers a vision of the transformation of nature-society relations in the language of justice: ‘Climate justice is predicated upon radically inclusive social and cultural relationships and interactions, both human and more-than-human’. Yet, in 2021, BIG, the architecture firm founded by Bjarke Ingels (and one of the members of the NEB’s high-level roundtable) produced visual communications for TMC, a notorious Canadian deep-sea mining company.
In a previous investigation, we debunked the image conveyed by BIG’s material that suggests deep-sea mining is environmentally friendly with no impact or waste (
For the European Commission at least, culture and institutionalised creativity, as exemplified by the New European Bauhaus, can enable change towards sustainable development goals and the green transition. Yet, despite its good intentions, and despite being an urgently needed initiative, it has not engaged meaningfully with the concerns of the Sámi people–as expressed by Sámi artists and cultural workers themselves. At the same, as we have shown, its mission is undercut by contradictory EU policy elsewhere. How, then, will artists, artistic researchers and practitioners establish their impact in Europe and beyond? And how will they interrogate the nexus of climate and cultural policy?
First, let’s place climate justice at the heart of a collective effort to decarbonize. This means keeping oil in the ground, forests intact, and land rights respected, in addition to mitigation and adaptation efforts. Secondly, let’s facilitate critical debates on reparations and loss and damage beyond the co-option, appropriation and neoliberalization of non-human nature in the climate-cultural policy nexus. This includes listening to the demands from the Global South that are about making the case for climate reparations and loss and damage compensations. To date, work along this trajectory has been practiced by the likes of the Creative Climate Justice programme at Julie’s Bicycle (a not-for-profit organisation that works within the arts and culture to sponsor action on the climate) and programs by the Prince Claus Fund (an arts and development foundation), such as Art for Climate Justice, a series of events that explored responses to the climate crisis.
Artistic research places a strong emphasis on flexible, participatory collaborations bringing together seemingly disparate disciplines, methodologies, and forms of decolonized knowledge. So, thirdly, let’s promote and empower arts-driven practices that meaningfully work towards accountability, advocacy and for public interest–because the struggle for social and environmental justice neither begins nor ends in a courtroom.
Climate change poses continuously evolving risks, creating a pressing need for new imaginaries. In response, our arts-driven research focuses on the social and scientific production of evidence in climate cases and questions where we establish responsibility and the agency of visibility, especially when faced with the indirect causes and effects of environmental destruction.
Insofar as practice through research, supported by progressive policy, seeks to make its impact, these interlinked trajectories serve as an outline. As trajectories, they do not offer solutions themselves, but rather lines of flight to open up spaces of debate. Through access to justice, criticality, and empowerment, we believe that civil society in Europe and around the world will be best placed as it continues to seek effective climate action.
The original contributions presented in the study are included in the article/supplementary material, further inquiries can be directed to the corresponding author.
All authors listed have made a substantial, direct, and intellectual contribution to the work and approved it for publication.
The author(s) declare that financial support was received for the research and/or publication of this article. Financial support for the Climate Rights project was received from Research Council of Norway under project number 335706. The costs of publication are covered by NTNU.
With thanks to Helsinki Biennale, Jillen Njaarjke reindeer hearding community, and Protect Sapmi. The authors also acknowledge the contribution of INTERPRT, an environmental justice research agency, in particular with regards to the Øyfjellet Wind case.
The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.
The author(s) declare that no Generative AI was used in the creation of this manuscript.