The role of judges in implementing climate policies has become a crucial component of the existing governance framework regulating climate change action. Litigation focusing on more ambitious climate action is trending globally. Individuals, local authorities and NGOs are bringing lawsuits against national governments, holding them accountable to their legal obligations and engendering policy change. Due to the constitutional doctrine of the separation of powers, the justiciability of climate policy is questioned. Disagreements exist between advocates of an activist judicial role and those in favour of legislative and executive discretion. The main question is to what extent the judiciary can oblige other government branches to take urgent preventative action, particularly to implement or adjust climate policies. Their role in implementing climate policies is analysed from a comparative perspective, considering theoretical debates on the doctrine of the separation of powers in different legal systems and relevant case-law. The chapter connects international and domestic issues and highlights recommendations to foster effective implementation of more ambitious climate policies.

At some point in the first century BCE, Yang Yun, one of nine ministers at the Western Han court, fell from the emperor’s grace. His uprightness, incorruptibility, and administrative skills were appreciated far and wide, but Yang Yun’s tendency to brag about these abilities, combined with a personality that appeared somewhat aloof, was destined to create friction. In 56 BCE, a series of charges led to his denouncement and his being stripped of his official position and noble title. Yang Yun was spared the death penalty, at least for the time being, to live a commoner’s life beyond the imperial palace. In his own words, ‘I lead my wife and children, and they join my efforts in plowing fields and planting mulberries, in watering orchards and kitchen gardens, in managing money-making ventures from which we pay taxes to the state thereby’.

The chapters assembled in this part turn to the key question of how the exercise of power was subject to a broad array of performative practices, in places as diverse as the administration of the state, public spectacles, agricultural production, and literature. Taco Terpstra kicks off with the performative dimension of statecraft. Due to their substantiated degree of structured hierarchies, standardized procedures, and the ability to employ officials with specific assignments, the imperial administrations of Rome and Han China capture, in exemplary fashion, the design of premodern statehood. Yet both governments looked rather different. While the Chinese relied on a large apparatus of officials who were appointed and paid by the state, Rome governed via a notoriously narrow pool of magistrates whose bureaucratic powers quintessentially built on the support of countless unsalaried local elites. Terpstra’s discussion of these differences departs from an analysis of how administrative rank and agency were expressed through clothing and other symbols of power. Prima facie minor aspects of the grand scheme of empire, the study of Sima Biao’s (third century CE) Treatise on Carriages and Robes, and On the Magistracies of the Roman State by John the Lydian (sixth century CE) offer exciting insight into the ways in which state power was conceived of and articulated throughout the empire. The chapter then segues into the question of state formation and the emergence of bureaucratic structures. Terpstra discloses how, in China, the thrust toward performance-based appointments and promotions preconditioned the rise of a professional bureaucratic corps, whereas the Romans, he argues, actively discouraged such a development. Both dispositions had eminent consequences for the longue durée of state power.

This chapter maintains that the International Court of Justice (ICJ) may usefully intervene in the complex and multifaceted litigation that has developed before national and international tribunals, as well as human rights treaty bodies, concerning national climate policies adopted to implement international obligations. By considering the rationale and nature of climate litigation, the chapter seeks to point out what international law rules the ICJ should take into account (especially clarifying their existence and scope) in order to make a real contribution to national and international jurisprudence.

The lawfulness of carbon border adjustment measures (CBAMs) under general international economic law and particular economic agreements is explored; specifically, if their international lawfulness can be determined by thinking of them as countermeasures necessary to implement climate change obligations. As there are no non-discriminatory obligations under customary international law, it is argued that CBAMs are lawful under general international law, but under particular international economic agreements they can be seen as countermeasures lawfully taken in response to breaching the obligation to curb GHG emissions, allowing their justification as a breach of primary non-discriminatory economic obligations, particularly the national treatment principle under the GATT and GATS. This shifts the burden of proving necessity/proportionality to the State in breach of the obligation. CBAMs are fundamentally lawful measures and can only give rise to compensation if it they are unnecessary/disproportionate. This chapter also assesses whether they can be thought of as erga omnes contractantes obligations under international economic agreements, particularly the GATT and the GATS.

This chapter discusses the building blocks of the European Union’s strategy for climate neutrality. Carbon pricing in the EU is described, focusing on the EU ETS and on the forthcoming CBAM. Then the roles of electrification and clean molecules in the future European energy system are discussed. Finally, sustainable finance priorities, capacities, and regulatory instruments put forward by the EU are reviewed, before a brief conclusion.

Russell opens the book with a plea for a new approach to the comparative study of ancient cities. Past scholars – with Rykwert as the foremost example – have pointed to claims in ancient Chinese and Roman literary materials that link cities with the cosmos. They have, furthermore, used these claims to argue that, in both ancient Rome and China, the idea of the city as a microcosmos is what led to what we might call ‘placemaking’, the process by which abstract space is made meaningful to humans. Rather than disproving these claims, Russell shows the limited reach of the literary materials. First, whatever the texts claim, real cities are never scaled-down models of the cosmos: whereas the texts may seek to imbue features of the human landscape with symbolic meaning, these are most often later ascriptions, explaining features of the city that have arisen for much more concrete, mundane reasons. Second, starting from the observation that both ancient China and ancient Rome are civilisations that take great pride in their past traditions, Russell shows how the theories that associate cities with cosmological ideas are, in fact, classicising constructions of a fairly late date (last two centuries BCE), part of a growing body of technical literature, that itself was spurred into being by the cultural and intellectual changes that attended Chinese unification and Roman imperial expansion. Thus, the similarities between Roman and Chinese cities turn out to hinge on highly abstract and relatively marginal concepts of space. By showing this, Russell frees up the field for a historical investigation of cities, not as spaces but as concrete, complex places with multiple and constantly evolving social meanings. This mode of investigation gets fully underway in subsequent chapters of the book.

It is, by now, beyond dispute that climate change presents the single greatest environmental challenge of our times. It is equally likely that this challenge will only be met by sustained and iterative cycles of global policy formation, administrative rule-making, regulatory action, and impact assessment. The second and third of these steps, broadly speaking, constitute the process of policy implementation. While the scholarly study of policy implementation is not new, it has yet to receive serious attention in the area of climate change regulation. The reasons for this are relatively simple.

First, the policy formation stage is still ongoing. As the recent meeting of the Conference of the Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) in Dubai vividly demonstrates, major outstanding disagreements on the basic structure of global climate policy remain.1

This chapter aims to inform reflection on business self-regulation (or corporate social responsibility, CSR) in addressing climate change by drawing on developments in ‘business and human rights’ and the experience accumulated in the European Union (EU). Despite dissimilarities in addressing the environmental and human right impacts of business operations, there are commonalities around incentives, impacts and regulatory dynamics of CSR that help clarify its expected place in global governance. This analysis revisits long-standing claims about CSR in light of current legal and market evolutions. The main finding is that the notion of CSR has been fundamentally transformed in the last 20 years. What is the change, what are the drivers enabling such change, and what are the expected impacts on corporate compliance and sustainability performance? The analysis contributes to the regulatory governance area, including regarding climate change, and promotes cross-fertilisation among the social and environmental areas in CSR.

This chapter explores the idea of gendered social performance through the texts of Plutarch and Sima Qian. Chandra Giroux investigates two categories of social performance in particular: friendship and authority, and death and grief. Both categories are approached from the perspective of each author’s own social performance in these scenarios as well as how they represent the social performance of women in them. Through an investigation of Plutarch’s and Sima Qian’s self-representations of their own social performances, she argues that both authors attempt to establish themselves as exemplary figures, ones that focus on the idea of the maintenance of harmony. In this way, Plutarch’s and Sima Qian’s actions are meant as a mirror for their readers’ own lives. In comparison, the chapter analyzes the examples of Timokleia and Timoxena in Plutarch’s corpus, as well as that of Nie Ying in Sima Qian’s work, to explore the authors’ notions of the ideal female reaction to friendship and authority, as well as that of death and grief. In this analysis, Giroux finds that both authors’ representations of women are based in the gender expectations of their respective societies. It is thus the differences between their cultures’ approaches to gender relations that dictate how Plutarch and Sima Qian understood the ideal female reaction to death, grief, friendship, and authority.

A comparative analysis of worldwide climate policies, taking the European Green Deal as a yardstick, shows only a limited degree of convergence. While the European Union (EU), the United States, Japan and People’s Republic of China (PRC) have set between 2050 and 2060 as a time limit to achieve climate neutrality, global practices aiming to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and adapt to their implications are still largely ineffective and unco-ordinated. Despite significant efforts, rather than displaying a harmonious framework, climate policies spanning the EU, the United States, PRC, Latin America, Middle East, Asia-Pacific, and Africa appear as a fragmented patchwork. This is true not only from the standpoint of external relations, comparing and contrasting the policy of different States and sovereign entities, but also internally, owing to such divisions as polycentric regulatory powers in federal States; asymmetric interests in geopolitical blocs such as the East, West, and Middle East; and different degrees of social cohesion in developing countries.

Martin Mohr’s chapter extends issues of urban space and infrastructure to the critical theme of Sacred Roads. It thus complements the chapters on neighborhoods, water supplies, and public gardens. Within the city and beyond its urban environment, roads have been both a facilitator of mobility and a conveyor of meaning at all times and in all cultures. Acknowledging the fundamental difference in the basic configuration of ancient Greek and Qin and Han Chinese societies, Mohr’s exploration of the significance of monumental roads emanates from the careful crafting of a meaningful matrix of comparison. He finds this in the typology of ancient societies as modelled in the works of Christoph Ulf; although tied to observations in the ancient Mediterranean, Mohr explains how the model is applicable to ancient worlds in general. Reliance on bureaucratic structures and techniques set Chinese building projects apart from the notoriously small scale of Greek roads. The question of physical disproportions set apart – note how Chang’an contained a monumental grid of multi-lane passage fares – the chapter demonstrates how the Direct Road, from Yunyang to Jiuyuan, was the religious and topographical backbone of Chinese society, much like sacred procession roads in ancient Greece, for instance on the island of Samos. In both cases, the purpose of reinforcing central strategies to establish physical connections between political and religious centres went hand in hand with the goal of achieving societal cohesion. The comparison concludes with further insight into regions between China and the Mediterranean, whose monumentally and ideologically inflated palatial cities once again accentuated an intriguing foil for the Greek example.