As other chapters in this volume show, the EU remedies system is difficult to employ when it comes to EU fundamental right violations. When discussing (im)possibilities of procedural rules and how these encourage or discourage litigation, socio-legal scholars have referred to the concept of legal opportunity structures. In relation to this concept, the EU is a system with closed procedural legal opportunities: rules on directly accessing the CJEU severely limit the possibilities to pursue strategic litigation. At the same time, the EU has opened up legal opportunities as well, by bringing litigants a new catalogue of rights to invoke. In the context of fundamental rights accountability, strategic litigation is used extensively. This begs the question: how are actors (NGOs, lawyers, individuals) making use of the (partially) closed EU system and what lessons can be drawn therefrom? This chapter delves into several cases of mobilisation of the EU remedies system and describes the way in which the actors involved worked with or around EU legal opportunity structures, both inside and outside the context of formal legal procedures. The lessons drawn from these actions can inform future action in this field.

Civil society actors play a crucial role in ensuring that breaches of environmental law are identified and reported to the bodies responsible for compliance. Nevertheless, civil society groups face severe limitations in respect of access to justice in environmental matters. In the European context, the literature concerning opportunities for legal mobilisation has long focussed on mobilisation efforts in relation to European Union environmental law, largely via national legal systems or the European Court of Justice (CJEU). Relatively underexplored, however, has been the role of (non-)compliance systems outside the EU’s institutional structure, operating with a similar geographical scope. In particular, the potential of the Convention on European Wildlife Conservation (1979) and its corresponding (non-)compliance mechanism has thus far been overshadowed by academic discourse on the mechanisms of the EU. The chapter argues that while the looming shadow of CJEU judgments lends an indispensable lever to NGOs seeking to protect biodiversity, less confrontational and civil society-oriented compliance mechanisms provide important additional avenues for legal mobilisation.

This chapter turns from the legal to the sociolegal to offer a different lens through which to consider the phenomenon of climate change litigation. By drawing on theoretical approaches in the study of legal mobilization, this chapter sheds light on some of the social and political dynamics of climate change litigation. I suggest that situating climate change litigation in its social and political context is useful in gaining a more holistic understanding of what is at stake when individuals and groups turn to the courts as part of their efforts to address the climate crisis. Drawing on the contributions to this volume, this chapter (1) shows how legal mobilization theory can be helpful to practitioners and scholars interested in understanding, explaining, and assessing climate change litigation in practice, and (2) highlights some of the ways in which studying climate change litigation can shape our conceptual and empirical understandings of processes of legal mobilization more generally.