Navigating transformations: Climate change and international law

Abstract The global climate crisis response envisioned by the Paris Agreement is commonly understood as demanding transformative change. International law, however, lacks a holistic conceptual framing for making sense of what such change would entail, how it might unfold, and who and what it will involve. Moreover, there has been little critical engagement with the question of what is at stake when invoking the notion of transformation. Contributing to the broader debate about what the climate crisis demands of international law, this article offers a critical conceptual appraisal of the notion of ‘transformation’. Conceptually, it describes transformative dynamics as processes which work towards radically different states of affairs that seem practically impossible under the status quo, but which could arguably be realized if different conditions were in place. Developing an ontology of transformative change, the article identifies heterogenous temporality, the actualization of impossible possibilities, and distributed engagement as three central features of transformations in climate crisis. Having laid the conceptual groundwork, the article then takes a critical turn and foregrounds unresolved tensions that run through transformation thinking. The aim here is to connect to critical discourses and show how these tensions can serve as entry points for international law to meaningfully engage with the notion of transformation. The article closes by offering some reflections on what engagement with the notion of transformation might mean for international law’s disciplinary identity, rationale, and sense of purpose.