2025 ESIL Collaborative Book Prize Winner

The 2025 ESIL Collaborative Book Prize was awarded in September 2025 during the 20th ESIL Annual Conference in Berlin to Jolene Lin (NUS) and Jacqueline Peel (University of Melbourne) for their book Litigating Climate Change in the Global South (Oxford University Press, 2024)

Jury’s report

We are delighted to recommend that the 2025 ESIL Collaborative Book Prize be awarded to Jolene Lin and Jacqueline Peel, for their co-authored monograph Litigating Climate Change in the Global South, published by Oxford University Press. The jury found the list of books nominated for the award this year to be very strong. We note, in particular, outstanding scholarly contributions on the nature of special regimes in international law, as well as the contemporary law and practice of international sanctions. The quality and diversity of the field, in our view, speaks well of the state of the discipline, even in difficult times for international law.

Litigating Climate Change in the Global South offers a timely and sophisticated study of climate litigation in the Global South. Through their detailed and comprehensive study of litigation initiatives across a wide range of jurisdictions, Lin and Peel provide a subtle account of these initiatives’ characteristic features, the actors and dynamics driving their emergence, and the various pathways through which their impact can be felt. The book makes a significant contribution to the field of international legal scholarship, offering a coherent, meticulously researched, and theoretically sophisticated analysis of an emerging domain of legal and political practice, successfully balancing academic rigour with practical relevance.

The jury appreciated the book’s focus on jurisdictions which are relatively less commonly studied in international law, in contrast to the mainly western-focussed analyses that have prevailed so far in legal literature. By eschewing parochialism, and including such a broad range of non-mainstream jurisdictions, it helps to integrate new voices and experiences into our understanding of the field of climate change litigation, sensitises us to the variegated social and political contexts in which such litigation is deployed, and underscores the necessity of pluralistic approaches to climate justice.

The jury was also particularly impressed by the subtle analysis of the multiple pathways of impact which climate litigation can have, not only on the law, but also on political dynamics around the issue of climate change. In doing so, Lin and Peel expand the frame beyond a narrow focus on rights-based, activist-led, strategic litigation, and show that climate-litigation is best understood not as an end in itself, but as a means to potentially multiple ends. This was also helped by the expansive and innovative definition of ‘climate change litigation’ developed in the book, which includes cases in which climate change issues appear on their face to be only an incidental aspect.

Litigating Climate Change in the Global South displays an empirical depth and theoretical coherence which make it a benchmark for future studies in this area, and in the jury’s view a deserved winner of the ESIL Collaborative Book Prize 2025.