Youth Climate Activism and Intergenerational Justice in Pakistan: A Review of Movements, Litigation, and Institutional Response

Abstract

Pakistan is somewhere in the middle of a unique global narrative involving youth climate actions and intergenerational justice. It is where one of the first rights-based climate rulings in the world was given, Leghari v. Federation of Pakistan (2015), years before the school-strike wave that has traditionally been recognized as starting the field; it saw one of the most devastating climate disasters of the decade in 2022 when millions of children were displaced from school; and it was where the diplomatic coalition that secured the Loss and Damage Fund at COP27 began. This review brings together the literature on youth climate movements, climate litigation and intergenerational justice theory to analyze how these three aspects movement, litigation and institutional engagement have manifested in Pakistan and how they have developed in other countries such as Germany, Switzerland, South Korea and the United States. The review concludes that youth and citizen-led climate mobilization in Pakistan has had an impact despite its scale, even if not as strong as mobilizations in the Global North; it is an action that predates the wave of global Fridays for Future in its legal aspect, has influenced policy infrastructure in Pakistan through the courts, and has informed Pakistan's exceptional climate finance diplomacy. Meanwhile, other remarkable disparities also persist between formal policy achievements and the outcomes of everyday life, notably in rural areas facing floods, in the failure to adequately resource the nation's Ministry of Climate Change and, more obviously, in the urbanization and elite nature of the country's most visible protest movements. The review is concluded by a case-study of Pakistan, which provides a valuable, but under-explored, example of how intergenerational claims for climate justice are pushed from the Global South.