Social movements and the EU courts: multilevel legal opportunity structures for climate change litigation

Law is inherently political, and social movements and civil society have long mobilised in the courts to carve out legal rights for themselves and achieve their movement goals. Yet, most research on how social movements use litigation has been undertaken in the US context, while in the EU the intersection between law and social movements has remained relatively unexplored. Yet, the EU’s multilevel legal system provides unique opportunities and challenges for groups to mobilise through legal avenues. This paper provides an overview of existing work on (EU) law and social movements, before focusing on the concept of legal opportunity structures and highlighting its potential utility in the study of EU law. It then examines how legal opportunities can help in the study of EU litigation by examining two transnational EU campaigns on climate change. Data for the paper comes from a document analysis of NGO and court documents, supplemented with interviews with civil society organisations. By drawing attention to structural conditions and the role of social movements in bringing litigation to the courts, legal opportunity structure approaches locate legal activity in the context of broader public policy debates and focus on bottom-up change.