Civil strategies for future generations

Abstract

This paper will examine the barriers to implementing climate justice from a New Zealand perspective. In particular, the paper will focus on the governance arrangements for implementing the Paris Agreement, administrative justice and the potential for activist NGO strategies following the majority Supreme Court decision in Buller Coal, and the role of the next generation in reconfiguring how we conceive environmental law and institutions in the remainder of this century. These themes will be interrogated through a critical analysis of deliberate political choice in framing climate change response legislation, the need to guarantee administrative justice through effective judicial remedies, the differing perceptions of the next generation about how to address climate change articulated via the most recent report from the Parliamentary Commissioner for the Environment, emerging new generational ways of holding government and institutions to account advanced by the Sarah Thomson judicial review proceedings before the High Court, and the vision for a new political agenda to confront the challenge of climate change imagined by Max Harris.