As climate crises intensify, grassroots movements are increasingly turning to legal systems to demand accountability, reshaping traditional notions of resilience through litigation and digital mobilisation. This paper examines Portugal’s emerging climate litigation movement through an ethnographic study of Último Recurso ("Last Resort"), the first Portuguese NGO dedicated to strategic climate lawsuits. Combining digital ethnography with participatory fieldwork, I analyse how the group navigates the ontological tensions between Eurocentric legal frameworks and Southern European ecological vulnerabilities, particularly in the aftermath of the catastrophic wildfires of 2017. Focusing on Último Recurso’s lawsuit against the Portuguese government for climate inaction, I explore how digital platforms (e.g., Instagram) serve as spaces for epistemic redefinition, where collective action transcends geographic boundaries. The NGO’s litigation strategy, which frames climate harm as a violation of human rights, challenges dominant resilience discourses by centering spatial justice and intergenerational ethics. At the same time, its organizing model reveals how marginalized communities reappropriate technocratic tools to demand systemic change. This research contributes to urgent debates in world anthropologies by interrogating how climate litigation reconfigures power relations, public policies, and collective imaginaries in Portugal—a nation at the frontline of Europe’s ecological precarity. It argues that such movements exemplify a critical epistemic shift: one that unearths humanity’s entangled fates through the meeting points of law, digital activism, and ontological resistance.
Rui Sá (2025) studied this question.