Group 11:
Climate Solutions
Transitional Justice
Mechanisms as a Bridge to a Sustainable Future
Sarah Dorman, Georgetown University Law Center
In response to the climate crisis, people around the world are
increasingly turning to litigation to curb emissions and hold polluters
accountable. This trend has been especially pronounced in the United States in
recent years. Yet unlike in peer countries where courts have ordered national
governments to aggressively cut emissions, climate litigation in the U.S. has
been largely unsuccessful at forcing climate action, and it has not yet led to
meaningful accountability for economic actors whose activities have contributed
most to the climate crisis.
While litigation is essential in the fight against climate change,
this paper will argue that lawyers and climate activists in the United States
should also draw upon tools developed in the field of transitional justice,
which has sought to address gross human rights violations in the context of
societies transitioning out of armed conflict or authoritarian rule. Building
on existing scholarship about how transitional justice can inform climate
governance internationally, as well as scholarship examining previous
applications of transitional justice mechanisms at local levels in the United
States, this article explores and evaluates possibilities for transitional
justice to complement litigation and other climate advocacy efforts in the U.S.
context. It identifies practical insights and tools from the field of
transitional justice that may be used not only for advancing accountability and
spurring climate action, but also for repairing those most impacted,
documenting the truth about the systems that have led to ecological breakdown,
and setting a collective course toward climate justice and a sustainable
future.
After the
Community-Based Organization Turn: Assessing Recent Federal Funding and
Incentives
Gabriel Pacyniak, University of New Mexico
School of Law
In 2021 and 2022, Congress enacted two sweeping laws that provided
over $450 billion dollars for climate and clean energy programs: the
Infrastructure, Investment and Jobs Act (IIJA) and the Inflation Reduction Act
(IRA). These bills together represent the most significant action to address climate
change by Congress. Due to political constraints, the federal action in these
bills is almost exclusively made up of grants, loans, tax credits, and other
financial incentives. In other words, almost all carrots and no regulatory
sticks. Critically, as a response to calls for an increased focus on equity
from climate and environmental justice communities, these bills featured
unprecedented funding opportunities that targeted or sought to be benefit
disadvantaged, underserved, and environmental justice communities. This
includes, for example, grant programs only open to Community-Based
Organizations (CBOs); grant programs for state and local agencies that require
partnerships with CBOs; an additional level of financial incentives for clean
energy development that takes places in “disadvantaged” or “energy”
communities; and technical assistance programs to help communities. Taken
together, these programs promise billions of dollars that will flow directly to
community organizations or are intended to benefit such communities. This
paper, however, recognizes and catalogs structural constraints to achieving the
vision of this funding. These include an incredibly short timeframe to commit
and disperse these funds; the complexity of having many different grant programs
with different eligibility requirements; the complexity of grant applications
and grant management and reporting; and the capacity and expertise limitations
of CBOs, among others.