Differentiation in International Environmental Law: Has Pragmatism Displaced Considerations of Justice?

The Third World Approaches to International Law (TWAIL) scholarly movement seeks to assess and to advance the ‘promise of international law to transform itself into a system based, not on power, but justice’, by considering how global norms impair or advance the interests of states in the Global South. This chapter seeks to contribute to the TWAIL scholarly project by examining whether international environmental law (IEL)’s norms and mechanisms have been a source of international legal innovation by challenging entrenched global socio-economic and power imbalances, making this field of law more supportive of the interests of the South. This chapter uses a TWAIL approach to understand evolution and innovation in IEL in the context of the growing South-South divide, as some emerging economies’ significant contributions to global environmental problems and their financial and technological capabilities to protect the global comment environment set them apart from other developing countries. It considers whether IEL has incorporated innovative norms and mechanisms in this changing geopolitical context that allow it to promote environmental justice at the global level