Kaleidoscopic Law: A Legal Ecology of the Climate Crisis

This thesis investigates the sociomaterial co-production of climate law by urban coalitions under transnational climate knowledge networks (TCKNs) in transnational and European multilevel climate governance. I argue that European “leading cities” and TCKNs co-assemble an experimentalist legal order nominally constructed to discipline emissions, recursively intersecting with supranational, international and national legal orders. The wicked problem of climate crisis means cities must adapt to several exigencies simultaneously. First, they must navigate the fragmentation of authority at scale. Second, they must accommodate the material demands of rapid adaptation and decarbonisation while developing economies of scale. Third, cities must contend with fiscal precarity and asymmetrical resource capacities. Fourth, they must operate under juridical indeterminacy, principally where novel measures exist in spaces of partial or attenuated legality. I argue that European cities have co-evolved nascent competences to strategically address these exigencies, in symbiotic collaboration with climate capital. These competences aggregated along numerous historical lines of articulation now intersecting to form a transnational assemblage of mechanisms, obligations, rules and other incentive structures that condition transnational conduct. Leading cities and TCKNs, exploiting cognitive and financial support from multilateral development banks and formal institutions, are constructing an experimental infrastructure for urbanised policy development and diffusion. Namely, I argue that “local experiments” in energy, mobility, infrastructure and other mitigative or adaptive domains are iterated and “upscaled” through interurban networks that translate pilots into templates and standards, producing a weakly institutionalised, experimentalist urban complex or “transnational legal (dis)order”. The contribution of this thesis is a theory of transnational legal process connecting urban practice to transnational legal ordering and a demonstration of recursive co-evolution between this urbanised legal order and the EU climate acquis and multilevel governance. I argue that complex transnational assemblages of actors are producing climate law in support of, but also parallel to, supranational and international orders. This constitutes a reconfiguration of authority across scales with implications for legitimacy, accountability and distribution in international law.