Revisiting Transnational Corporations and Extractive Industries: Climate Justice, Feminism, and State Sovereignty

This Article explicitly examines the relationship between climate justice, gender, and transnational fossil fuel extractive industries by drawing upon feminist theoretical insights. First, I provide an overview of the differential impacts of climate change on women and briefly review insights from select international legal scholars who have considered gender and climate change. Second, I describe the Philippines climate petition, a novel attempt to seek an investigation into the accountability of transnational fossil fuel companies for climate harms. Third, I examine three sets of issues arising in the Philippines climate petition and draw explicitly upon Karen Knop’s Re/Statements: Feminism and State Sovereignty in International Law. Here, I consider how feminist approaches to international legal theory might enrich the analysis of legal doctrines fundamental to framing the issues and outcome of the Philippines climate petition. Specifically, I consider three different sets of claims that emerge from a critique of the bounded, autonomous, and unified liberal subject that informs implicit understandings of state and sovereignty at international law. In conclusion, I argue that climate justice demands we take up a relational view of the state, dissolve boundaries between public and private sectors, and embrace visions of overlapping sovereignties.