Is environmental law hopeful?

1. Introduction

It is often regarded as part of human nature to focus on what is understood to be lacking. This may help to explain the recent proliferation of studies of hope. ‘Hope studies’ – a vibrant, interdisciplinary field^[1] – has emerged particularly from contexts where hope is perceived to be in short supply.^[2] The increased interest in hope has, in some contexts, been prompted by a heightened sense of crisis, both in the realities under study – such as ecological breakdown, a global pandemic, geopolitical instability, rapid technological change and growing socio-economic inequality^[3] – and within academic disciplines themselves. Calls for ‘positive sociology’,^[4] ‘bright anthropology’,^[5] ‘affirmative politics’^[6] and ‘post-critical pedagogy’,^[7] for example, have tended to arise in response to feelings of frustration, disillusionment and despair – a loss of hope – in relation not only to subject matter but also to approaches to scholarship, broadly construed. Much of the field has come to be characterised by two standpoints, namely the inquiry into the forms and conditions of hope, and the question of what it means to engage in academic work hopefully. This article explores what this might entail in the context of law, specifically environmental law, and asks: Is environmental law hopeful?^[8]

There is no straightforward answer, and the article uses the question to frame a range of perspectives. While recognising that hope has various meanings and implications, not all of them positive or progressive, it argues that hope is a necessary point of engagement in environmental law. Although within environmental law hope is frequently dismissed as illusory and uncritical,^[9] the article considers other ways in which hope does, or could, play a role. These include hope as a salient aspect of environmental law itself, and hope as a guiding ethos – a way of orienting environmental law teaching and research. I want to invite environmental law scholars to reflect on hope not merely as a state of mind but also as an activity – a practice, marked by sustained commitment^[10] – that shapes disciplinary style and tone, and disciplinary character.

To be clear, I am not urging environmental law scholars to ‘be more hopeful’, as if that were all that is needed to meet the challenges in the field. Rather, I want to acknowledge the part played by scholarship, however modest, in fostering an atmosphere of hopefulness, or, conversely, hopelessness. I began thinking about hope along these lines upon realising how little I had to say about environmental law that was positive. I soon learned that hope is not a matter of forced positivity, or of being upbeat for its own sake.^[11] Instead, it involves confronting the prospect – indeed, the reality – of failure and defeat in environmental law, while also persisting in an openness to possibilities that may emerge through and around environmental law for a changed, better future. In this sense, hope is not necessarily the comforting illusion that it is sometimes made out to be. It is what remains after the hollowing out of any illusion that things are as they should be – a resilience, a refusal to give up, a taking on of responsibility.^[12]

To capture these themes and contribute to efforts to introduce a degree of structure into an otherwise vast area, while retaining the tentativeness that a topic like hope requires, I present the argument in two main parts. These correspond to, and adapt, the two distinct but related standpoints or orientations already identified within hope studies. I describe the first as thinking towards hope (Section 2), because it treats hope as the object of inquiry, asking what it means, or might mean, to understand hope as a feature or dimension of environmental law. The second I refer to as thinking from hope (Section 3), because hope provides the starting point and is explored as a mode of engagement with environmental law, including as a possible method and responsibility within environmental law scholarship. My aim is not to conclude that environmental law is or is not hopeful. Instead, the question in the article’s title opens up consideration of the different ways in which hope may have relevance here. Given the nature and scale of the problems that environmental law now faces, the question of hope has become especially significant, and is likely to remain so.

2. Thinking towards hope in environmental law

A. High hopes? Semester one, week one

At the beginning of each academic year, I ask the new cohort of undergraduate environmental law students a series of questions. These are the questions that I ask at the start of any course, about why the students have chosen the module, what they expect from it, and how they feel about the semester ahead. Although responses are mixed, the majority indicate a perception that, in the current political moment, society is failing to address the world’s most serious environmental harms – and that what is needed is more, or better, law.

I mention this because, year after year, I am struck both by the students’ belief in what law can achieve and by the weight of expectation it places not only on the subject but also on us as a teaching team. It can be daunting as well as exciting. It feels bittersweet too – knowing, as any teacher does, that this energised sense of possibility is likely to fade not long after the module is underway. I am not suggesting that the students’ initial expectations are clearly mistaken. The students may have less experience or formal expertise, but they bring curiosity and fresh ways of thinking. I do, however, want to pause for a moment on the idea of a legal subject having an identifiable mood or atmosphere.^[13]

Other areas of legal teaching seem to have been more attentive to disciplinary moods or ‘vibes’.^[14] Property law subjects, in particular, often rely on this to capture students’ attention. It is not uncommon, for example, for textbooks in land law to begin by acknowledging the subject’s reputation as ‘boring’^[15] and ‘something to be endured’,^[16] before resolving to ‘dispel fears’^[17] about it. The task of the land law textbook becomes one of persuading the reader out of their ‘weary resignation’^[18] and into a state of, if not excitement, at least interest.

The task of the environmental law textbook feels different from the outset. It is, of course, an unfair comparison – not least because, as an elective subject, environmental law can be expected to spark greater enthusiasm in students, compared with land law, which typically forms part of a compulsory core. It is noticeable, however, how students tend to come to environmental law – and to international environmental law especially – with a great deal of optimism, enough that it has been recognised and named. As Elizabeth Fisher observes, ‘anyone who has taught international environmental law will have had the experience of those who understand the subject as literally being about saving the world’.^[19] Here, the challenge is not to persuade or excite so much as it is to guard against ‘wishful thinking’.^[20]

This highlights how the study of environmental law, as with other areas of law, involves more than the examination of legal doctrine.^[21] But what is that ‘more’?^[22] By directing this question to international law, Gerry Simpson shows that it is possible to understand distinct legal fields as having their own ‘sensibilities’^[23] – that is, ways of being in and relating to the world. For Simpson, international law is ‘a mode of thought, method, speech and set of professional expectations and instincts’.^[24] It is ‘a cultural project’,^[25] with its own language, style, tone and emotional or affective life. These qualities ‘define the field every bit as much as the content of its rules’.^[26] The point is not that legal rules do not matter – clearly, they do – but rather that they are not all that matter.

This suggests, in turn, that there is more to be said about what is asked or expected of environmental law – especially where its normative aspirations exceed what is achieved, or could be achieved, in practical terms.^[27] This is, however, a different conversation from the one usually had. Instead of viewing the widely invoked gap between legal aspirations and reality solely as a deficiency to be corrected or a void to be filled, the emphasis shifts towards understanding it as a space already partially occupied by different intensities of feeling and active dispositions – among them, hope.

B. Hope as an object of inquiry

In order to move from general impressions of hope in environmental law to more targeted analysis, it is first necessary to ‘establish the phenomenon’^[28] – to describe hope and outline its contours. There are multiple ways of doing this, each involving decisions about what counts as relevant, but before proceeding to explain how a phenomenon came to be, it must first be shown to exist. Sociologist Robert K Merton describes ‘this tacit theorizing about aspects of social reality before you know what it is that you are looking for’.^[29] ‘It starts’, says Merton, ‘as a vague notion and sometimes ends in nothing. But every so often, the tacit becomes explicit and leads to new problems worth pursuing.’^[30]

One of the challenges with hope is that, by its nature, it can remain ‘a vague notion’ – like ‘a castle in the air’,^[31] as Terry Eagleton puts it. Yet hope is not without empirical foundation, as numerous studies in psychology and behavioural sciences,^[32] sociolinguistics^[33] and cultural studies^[34] have demonstrated. It has an even longer tradition, notably, in theology, philosophy and classics.^[35] In recent years, this has been accompanied by a ‘veritable explosion’^[36] of interest in hope, such that it has become possible to speak of ‘the anthropology of hope’,^[37] ‘a sociology of hope’,^[38] ‘geographies of hope’,^[39] ‘the economy of hope’^[40] and ‘politics of hope’.^[41] Law is a relative newcomer to the field and is increasingly engaging with hope as an object of inquiry.^[42]

Hope is often best approached in terms of what it is not, given the tendency to understand it too narrowly or to conflate it with related concepts. For instance, contrary to some common understandings, hope is not optimism. Optimism is ‘simply a quirk of temperament’^[43] – a belief that things usually work out well, even when ‘the facts do not support it’.^[44] Hope, however, is ‘rational’^[45] and ‘needs to be underpinned by reasons’.^[46] Even so, hope offers no guarantee of fulfilment – it may be thwarted or left unrealised. It is ‘disappointable’.^[47] The hoped-for outcome must nevertheless remain possible, even if not probable. Hope is thus characterised by in-betweenness, as Rebecca Bryant and Daniel M Knight suggest:

[H]ope emerges in the gap between the potential and the actual, between matter and its not-yet form. Hope is something that doesn’t presently exist but potentially could; hope is based on more than a possibility and less than a probability. In that sense, hope is a way of virtually pushing potentiality into actuality.^[48]

Understanding hope in terms of both potentiality and possibility helps to explain its frequent association with imagination and utopianism.^[49] Yet hope is not equivalent to either. Imagination may be classified in many different ways,^[50] but one feature common to its various forms is mental imagery – a cognitive process involving the simulation of internal, perceptual-like experiences across different sensory modalities (eg visual, auditory, tactile).^[51] More broadly, imagination refers to ‘the ability to form thoughts and mental images that stretch beyond what is currently available to the senses’.^[52] It is an engaged mental state,^[53] one that is typically understood as a precursor to action.^[54] Hope, by contrast, may be understood as supplying the motivational force that drives and sustains action.^[55]

Utopianism occupies a similar conceptual space, but it too remains distinct from hope. It is popularly conceived in terms of ‘impossible perfection’,^[56] with utopias figuring ‘as perfect impossible places, located on some distant shore or in some distant, usually future, age’.^[57] The connotation of ‘fantastical dreaming’^[58] is not universally shared and obscures a more nuanced understanding of utopianism.^[59] It does, however, highlight a point at which utopianism is typically distinguished from hope, in that hope is said to depend on possibility rather than impossibility. ‘Impossibility’, says Eagleton, ‘cancels hope but not desire’.^[60]

While hope is in these and other ways distinguishable from imagination and utopianism, some accounts note areas of overlap or resonance between them. For example, Ernst Bloch’s account of the experience of hope emphasises an intimate connection between hope and what is described as ‘the utopian impulse’.^[61] Other combinations, such as ‘imaginative hope’^[62] and even ‘hopeful pessimism’,^[63] also illustrate how these ideas can be held together. They suggest that hope is not stand-alone and that attempts to draw clear distinctions may be of limited value. This does not lessen the analytical purchase of hope, because hope does not collapse into imagination or utopianism but instead acquires meaning through its settings and relations.

Although law has proved an especially generative site for examining imagination and utopianism,^[64] and has been a place of extensive research on emotions,^[65] hope has not been a prominent focus of legal analysis. Rather, hope has tended to appear indirectly or in connection with those other concepts. In environmental law, for example, Fisher shows how the narratives that inform legal imagination around climate change can too readily reduce legal complexity and messiness into emotionally satisfying stories of hope – hope that often turns out to be weakly grounded.^[66] This raises concerns about forms of hope that may be described as ‘bad’ hope,^[67] and points to an important dimension of hope in environmental law relating to how it is framed and communicated.

Environmental law also enables hope to be analysed across temporal (including event-based) and structural dimensions, making it possible to recognise circumstances in which hope appears deficient at one level yet potentially significant at others. My aim in what follows is to develop this line of inquiry, by exploring these further ways in which hope takes shape in environmental law – both in and around legal events (which I refer to as ‘eventful’ hope^[68]), and in its embedding within legal structures (‘institutionalised’ hope^[69]).

Not only does environmental law provide a compelling context for considering hope, but it also provides an especially timely one, given the multiple crises that currently animate the field.^[70] Environmental law, as a field of study and practice, is grappling with some of the gravest challenges facing humanity. Global environmental problems such as climate change, biodiversity loss and persistent, bioaccumulative pollutants are increasingly understood in terms of tipping points and functional collapse.^[71] These problems are not merely ‘wicked’^[72] but ‘super wicked’^[73] in their capacity to overwhelm, disrupt and destabilise the existing legal order.^[74] Even routine, localised environmental issues can present considerable challenges, involving contested knowledge claims, divergent values and competing interests, with no simple solution and no single legal or policy ‘fix’.^[75] As a result, environmental law is frequently faced with its limitations, and it can often appear more closely associated with despair than with hope.^[76]

Against this backdrop, the prospect of environmental law without hope seems in some fundamental way to be problematic. Importantly, this is not to suggest a turn away from despair but rather to recognise despair as a condition from which hope can arise. As Eagleton observes:

[T]he most authentic kind of hope is whatever can be salvaged, stripped of guarantees, from a general dissolution. It represents an irreducible residue that refuses to give way, plucking its resilience from an openness to the possibility of unmitigated disaster. It is thus as remote from optimism as could be imagined.^[77]

A demanding conception of hope such as this directs analysis towards the legal events, institutions and related practices in which it may be generated and sustained.

C. Eventful hope

As the discussion so far has indicated, there are various ways in which the analysis of hope can be framed. For present purposes, I will focus on two framings which, though not unique to environmental law, may be particularly relevant to it. I describe the first as ‘eventful’ hope because it arises from a disruptive, or potentially disruptive, occurrence.^[78] It requires some actual or anticipated departure from established legal, political or regulatory norms. Accordingly, hope can be understood as located in critical moments or turning points – in ‘the bare potential of newness’.^[79] These moments or turning points tend to coincide with new legal interventions, such as headline legislation, landmark rulings or major policy innovations. The dynamic is perhaps similar to that seen in the ‘hype cycles’^[80] of technological innovation, in which expectations build, fall short and build again. The focus within such cycles is typically less on whether expectations are ultimately fulfilled than on how expectations become organised around particular moments.

Eventful hope can further be understood as episodic, insofar as it takes shape in discrete acts and interactions between individual actors. This is reflected in Conor Gearty’s account of how hope coalesces around litigation as a legal event:

Hope is a constant companion in all litigation. Even with corporate entities, there are human steerers whose emotions and cognitive processes will include an aspiration for victory. The same is true – only more obviously – of ‘real’ human litigants, as it is also for the lawyers in all such cases seeking to turn their arguments into legal findings. Even the judge overseeing the whole process hopes they will not be overruled. The case is only before them, most likely, because some lawyer somewhere has quantified the chances of victory as better than even, as a hope rationally rooted in legal precedent.^[81]

Similar patterns are also visible in environmental litigation, particularly in recent years, given the growing frequency of climate change-related claims brought before the courts. Kim Bouwer, for example, identifies a preoccupation in this context with ‘high-stakes, high-profile and high-ambition action that seeks to solve many problems in one sexy, heroic action’.^[82] A similar observation is made by Fisher, who notes that ‘[i]f litigants succeed, it is understood as a win for climate change. If they lose, it is a loss for climate change’.^[83]

This emphasis is evident in how international climate judgments and advisory opinions are often received. In particular, the issuance of a climate judgment or advisory opinion by an international court or tribunal has come to be viewed as a notably significant ‘event’ of hope – or, some might say, hype. This reflects the heightened expectations that can attach to these moments. For example, the International Court of Justice’s recent advisory opinion^[84] on the obligations of States in respect of climate change has been celebrated as ‘the great reset’,^[85] bringing ‘renewed hope’.^[86] The European Court of Human Rights’ Grand Chamber ruling in the KlimaSeniorinnen case^[87] against Switzerland is similarly said to mark a ‘watershed moment’^[88] in European climate litigation. Yet this sense of hope is not shared by everyone. Some have doubted whether judicial interventions can actually bring about the change that they are sometimes understood to offer. The partly dissenting opinion makes this clear:

I also do worry that, in having taken the approach and come to the conclusion they have, the majority are, in effect, giving (false) hope that litigation and the courts can provide ‘the answer’ without there being, in effect, any prospect of litigation (especially before this Court) accelerating the taking of the necessary measures towards the fight against anthropogenic climate change.^[89]

Hope that is concentrated in single, high-profile events such as this can be especially prone to criticisms of false promise or hollowness.^[90] However, the problem is often not that the hope may lack substance but that it takes on a perhaps disproportionate significance because of the event itself. In this sense, even empty or unsupported hope can function as a mode of legal and political organisation, channelling meaning and action into specific moments or episodes.

Declarations of climate and biodiversity emergency offer additional illustrations of hope in ‘eventful’ form, as it is through the act of declaring an emergency or crisis that environmental problems come to be framed as discrete events. Of course, in important respects, it makes little sense to characterise climate change and biodiversity loss in this way, given that they involve ongoing and complex processes. Yet the declaratory move creates a ‘break with normality’ and, with it, a demand for urgent response.^[91] In doing so, it renders such problems eventful, providing not only a focal point for the mobilisation of fear and anxiety but also, as Ben Anderson notes, ‘an occasion for hope’^[92] – hope, however fragile, that action is still possible and might make a difference.^[93]

In 2018, Bristol City Council was the first local authority in the UK to declare a climate emergency,^[94] followed by its declaration of an ecological emergency in 2020.^[95] Many other local authorities have taken the same step, with nearly 80 per cent now estimated to have made declarations of this kind.^[96] In 2019, the UK Parliament became the first national parliament to declare a climate and ecological emergency,^[97] with additional declarations from the Scottish and Welsh Governments and the Northern Ireland Assembly.^[98] This is not a phenomenon observed only in the UK. By 2023, more than 2,000 climate emergency declarations had been made by governments in at least 40 countries worldwide.^[99]

Jocelyn Stacey describes these declarations as occupying ‘a legally ambiguous space’.^[100] Although their legal status and effects remain largely untested, they are widely regarded as rhetorical devices without legal teeth. Nevertheless, there may be circumstances in which they can have legal significance – such as in underpinning new legislative proposals,^[101] or in providing a context in which administrative decisions are made.^[102] It follows that the hope generated by emergency declarations may be event-bound and short-lived. At the same time, in some contexts, eventful hopes may be stabilised or taken up in more durable, institutionalised forms.

D. Institutionalised hope

As well as eventful hope, arising from particular instances, there is what I describe as ‘institutionalised’ hope, which is embedded in legal structures and practices. This marks a shift from momentary hope to a more enduring – though still contingent – form. As Nicola Lacey argues, ideas such as trust, fairness, love and hope are psychological states in interpersonal life that can also have ‘institutional counterparts’.^[103] These counterparts may develop legal significance, make legal regimes more intelligible and shape responses to legal rules and arrangements.^[104] Lacey explains that ‘[t]hose sceptical of the idea that concepts like “forgiveness” or “hope” can readily be translated into institutional terms – like those who argued that the idea of “corporate responsibility” was a category error – have failed to grasp the ways in which institutions like law and other regulatory systems “see” the world and “think” about it’.^[105]

In environmental law, although hope may not be explicitly stated in legal norms or doctrine (as it is in the ‘right to hope’,^[106] for instance), there can still be situations in which hope, even if unexpressed, might be seen as part of its functioning. One place in which this institutionalised form of hope can be seen is in the emergent culture – at least in some areas of environmental law in the UK – of legislated and policy-supported goals, outcomes, objectives, targets and indicators.^[107] The Environment Act 2021 requires the setting of long-term targets within specified priority areas (air quality, water, biodiversity, and resource efficiency and waste reduction),^[108] and other bespoke targets for particulate matter and species abundance.^[109] For example, the statutory targets for restoring nature include ensuring that at least 70 per cent of protected features in Marine Protected Areas are in favourable condition by 2042.^[110]

There are further obligations to achieve various other environmental objectives, such as those included in the Water Framework Directive Regulations and detailed in River Basin Management Plans, which are developed, implemented and updated in six-yearly cycles.^[111] The latest cycle, for example, includes the obligation to bring 77 per cent of England’s surface water bodies to ‘good ecological status’ or ‘good ecological potential’ by 2027.^[112] There is also, as is well known, the 2050 net-zero greenhouse gas emissions target in the Climate Change Act 2008.^[113]

Certain target and outcome duties are described as taking a form that ‘embodies a hope’^[114] and are commonly understood as ‘aspirational’ – as statements of ‘desirable social aims’,^[115] rather than specific duties owed to an individual. The idea that such legislated target and outcome duties could embody hope is not widely viewed positively. Rather, hope, or aspiration in this context, tends to be used in a ‘rose-tinted’ sense to suggest a degree of naivety about legislation whose norms cannot be effectively – typically understood to mean judicially – enforced.

It is often pointed out that, in respect of outcome duties such as the duty to ensure net-zero by 2050, breach can only arise once the due date has been reached – meaning that any claim brought thereafter could be regarded as ‘futile’^[116] or ‘academic’^[117] and therefore not entertained by the courts.^[118] Similarly, certain targets under the Environment Act 2021 are said to be ‘sufficiently long-term … that the fact of non-compliance will not become entirely apparent until it is too late for action to be meaningful’.^[119]

Understandably, this can lead to an impression of legislated targets as hopeful, but only symbolically or ‘performatively’^[120] so. Yet there may be other ways in which hope operates within these regimes. For example, provision is also made for interim targets and shorter-term plans and carbon budgets, which not only allows hope to be built into structured trajectories but also holds open its inherent contingency.^[121] By creating more frequent points of potential failure and recalibration, these arrangements attempt to limit the circumstances in which complacency can arise. This can be seen, for instance, in the Marine Protected Areas target – that 70 per cent are in favourable condition by 2042 – which is accompanied by an interim target to ensure that, by 2030, that figure is at least 49 per cent.^[122] From this perspective, hope may be understood as an active commitment that is enabled, or constrained, by the structures that define its possibilities. In broader terms, this is indicative of a ‘political economy of hope’^[123] in which the structural conditions of environmental law make different hopes and degrees of hopefulness more or less possible.^[124]

Parallels may also be drawn with the structural embedding of hope, or more specifically of the conditions for hope, in the environmental provisions of constitutions. Constitutional law has long been viewed as an important instrument for advancing environmental objectives, with the focus tending to fall on constitutionally entrenched rights, such as the human right to a clean and healthy environment, and, more recently, on calls for the further constitutionalisation of rights of nature.^[125] Also significant in this context are directive principles, which are ‘primarily addressed to the political organs of the state to programmatically secure certain social, political or economic goals of a “transformative” character’.^[126]

Directive principles, as Lael K Weis observes, are increasingly being used for the constitutional entrenchment of environmental values.^[127] Examples include principles that ‘[i]t is the duty of the State and the population to conserve, protect and use natural resources and the biodiversity in a sustainable manner, as well as to maintain the equilibrium of the environment’;^[128] and that ‘[t]he State shall … work to achieve and maintain a tree cover of at least ten per cent of the land area’.^[129] Weis goes on to argue that such provisions represent an important – and often overlooked – source of constitutional legal norms, despite criticisms that they are non-justiciable or otherwise unenforceable, and therefore purely aspirational.^[130]

To the extent that there is hope in this setting, it can be said to be rooted not in direct judicial enforcement but instead in institutional arrangements that assign responsibility for implementation in the political organs of the state. The hope that operates here may therefore be described as resembling the features of directive principles themselves as ‘programmatic’, involving ‘sustained, multi-pronged and multi-stepped effort over a long period of time’^[131] – a ‘process rather than a single-step event’.^[132]

E. The trouble with hope-spotting

The purpose of the preceding discussion has been to illustrate how different forms of hope can manifest and operate within environmental law. In treating hope as discernible in particular forms – such as moments of disruption or programmatic commitments – it may be tempting to view hope as analytically unproblematic. There are, however, several difficulties with approaches to ‘hope-spotting’,^[133] which require attention.

One difficulty is that hope takes such varied forms that it can easily lose analytical traction. Hope is described as ‘a notably fuzzy concept’, which, ‘[b]y design or by default … is often left undefined and deployed in different ways even within single studies’.^[134] It is also said that ‘[a] clear and consistent grasp of what it is to hope will always elude us’.^[135] That is not necessarily a reason to avoid the area of study, and there may even be merit in refraining from defining hope too narrowly, or at all, in order to preserve its open and adaptable character.^[136]

The difficulty arises because there are many, sometimes contradictory, conceptions of hope in environmental law, each of which can orient analysis in different ways. Moreover, multiple different hopes may coexist within the same legal setting. In relation to environmental targets, for example, the hoped-for outcome is not just limited to net-zero emissions by 2050 but can also include conceptions of the appropriate balance between political and legal accountability, which may be understood and taken up differently by those involved.^[137]

A further difficulty is that, even if there could be consensus, or something approaching it, over definition, there may be real disparity in how hope is distributed and experienced.^[138] For instance, Ghassan Hage describes how capitalist society produces a form of social hope – through ‘its ability to maintain an experience of the possibility of upward social mobility’^[139] – giving rise to a ‘differential of hope’,^[140] reflected not only in the unequal distribution of hope but also in the practices that extract and exploit it. Hope emerges as a relation of privilege and power that can also serve as a structure of oppression.^[141] Yet the generally positive connotations of hope can deflect attention from these distributive concerns and relations of inequality.

There is also the difficulty that researchers of hope tend to be selective about the hopes they seek out, studying only the hopes they find ‘likeable’^[142] – while avoiding those they do not, or interpreting them using other analytical frameworks. In some of my own work, I have been more inclined to frame the effects of Brexit on UK environmental law in terms of risk – even though, to many, Brexit did and still does represent hope, a view I do not share. That is not to say that the search for hope necessarily results in finding any. Rather, such an orientation may expose the analysis to different types of questions, about the interplay between individual hopes and collective realities,^[143] and about the power dynamics that shape which futures, and whose, come to be felt not just as probable but as possible. This too suggests that the study of hope as an object of inquiry in environmental law is not as straightforward as it might first appear.

3. Thinking from hope in environmental law

The focus above has been on the sorts of forms that hope can take and the conditions under which hope may arise or become embedded in environmental law. In pursuing this approach, an account begins to emerge of what it means for hope to be an object of inquiry in this context. As this approach centres on what to look for in hope and where to look for it, and aims to move closer to a conceptual understanding of hope’s legal conditions of existence, I have referred to this as a way of thinking towards hope.

Another approach, however, is to view hope not only in environmental law but also in the scholarship relating to it – in the choices of scholarly focus and modes of scholarly inquiry. This raises questions about the purposes and commitments of environmental law scholarship, prompting reflection on whether it is the role of scholarship, or even a responsibility, to seek to attend to and sustain hope. With hope guiding both what is studied and how it is studied, this can be described as a way of thinking from hope.

A. ‘Hope as method’ in environmental law scholarship

The shift in perspective – thinking from, rather than towards, hope – takes inspiration from a similar pivot made within interventions in utopian studies. For example, Ruth Levitas argues that utopia should be understood not as a goal but as a method – ‘as heuristic rather than telic’,^[144] and ‘as exploratory rather than prescriptive’.^[145] On this account, despite common interpretations, utopia is ‘not about devising and imposing a blueprint’,^[146] and nor is it ‘an impossible quest for perfection’.^[147] Its value lies less in what is imagined than in the act of imagining – a process that challenges assumptions ‘about the real, the possible, the probable, the desirable’^[148] and ultimately unsettles the status quo. Relatedly, Davina Cooper conceives of utopian thinking ‘as an orientation or form of attunement, a way of engaging’,^[149] and as a ‘conceptual attitude’,^[150] rather than simply a projection of desired end-states.

Thinking from hope, as an approach, also draws on Hirokazu Miyazaki’s account of hope as ‘a method of knowledge formation, academic and otherwise’.^[151] According to Miyazaki, such an approach aligns with efforts to reorient philosophical inquiry around the limits of knowledge – the future unknown, the ‘not yet’, which are the driving forces of hope.^[152] Hope, in other words, can be treated as an epistemic practice, a way of approaching knowledge that foregrounds the indeterminacy that makes hope possible.^[153] Crucially, ‘hope as method’ does not simply involve documenting moments of hope. It also involves re-enacting hopeful moments ‘on another terrain’^[154] – the terrain of anthropology, on Miyazaki’s account, although other terrains may be equally suited to such re-enactment, including, perhaps, the terrain of environmental law.

If Miyazaki, through his work on ‘hope as method’, aims ‘to generate a hopeful moment’^[155] for anthropology, then a similar approach may also be possible within environmental law, and within law more generally. A defining feature of hope studies is that it aims not only ‘to describe the conditions of others’ hope’ but also ‘to produce the conditions for scholarly hope’.^[156] For Miyazaki, ‘there is no critical study of hope; there is only hopeful scholarship’.^[157] In what ways might legal scholarship, and specifically environmental law scholarship, be positioned as hopeful?

It may, for example, involve emphasising contingency, including the contingency of legal fictions, which function because they are taken up and repeated, even though they could be otherwise. Annelise Riles argues that the ‘as if’ quality of legal fictions serves, in Miyazaki’s terms, as a hopeful ‘reorientation’ of legal knowledge.^[158] The power of such fictions is said to lie not in their invention – whether by creative judges or legislators to overcome limits in existing legal categories – but in the ongoing, collective ‘act of replication’,^[159] including by academics.

Riles reflects on the passing of legal fictions ‘from the hands of teacher to student’.^[160] She gives the example of the ‘implied warranty’ in lease agreements, although in environmental law examples might include rights of nature, environmental personhood or environmental guardians. As Riles observes, ‘the purposes for the creation of the legal fiction recede from view as students replicate the practice’,^[161] on their journey to ‘thinking like a lawyer’.^[162] This ‘ability to go on’^[163] through replication is framed as a form of hope – one in which ‘legal knowledge comes into agentive being in the process of its being handed from one legal actor to another, and in that process … comes to constitute the very actors that deploy it’.^[164]

This focus on contingency may also be explored through other ‘assertions of a subjunctive or conditional mood’.^[165] The subjunctive in ‘if’ clauses – ‘as if’, ‘what if’, ‘if only’ – ‘creates an order that is self-consciously distinct from other possible social worlds’.^[166] Some of the most vivid illustrations of ‘subjunctive jurisprudence’^[167] come from critical judgments projects, which in environmental law include Wild Law Judgments,^[168] Earth Law Judgments^[169] and Anthropocene Judgments.^[170] By revisiting judgments of the past or anticipating practices of judging in and for the future, these projects are designed to prise open alternative futures, or pasts, and demonstrate that ‘where you start from can have an effect on where you end up’.^[171] They sit within wide-ranging initiatives to ‘reimagine’ familiar narratives in environmental law,^[172] to ‘reconfigure’ its underlying structures,^[173] and even to ‘prefigure’ the conditions that shape what follows.^[174] Efforts such as these may not save us from climate change, but they ‘remind us of the need for a constant reflection on who tells the story’^[175] – and bring with them a hope-oriented mode of engaging, rather than a mode anchored in the fatalism of inevitability.

A related challenge to this sense of inevitability lies in placing events within a longer arc of history, in order to see how situations that were once ‘unthinkable’^[176] become not only imaginable but also part of ordinary legal and political discourse. It may also involve what Mathias Thaler calls ‘a renewed appreciation of failure’.^[177] Several of the examples I have referred to above are regarded, in conventional legal terms, as having little or no ‘real’ legal consequence, as falling short of some ideal. Declarations of climate emergency, as previously noted, are often dismissed as non-legal. Yet local authorities may see such declarations as a means of ‘expansively inhabiting’^[178] their agency, in situations where they understand their agency to be limited – a way of ‘acting notwithstanding … dissatisfaction, and sometimes deep loss of faith, in the capacity of traditional state-based modes of law’.^[179] This does not replace the need for decisive, state-based action, but it is worth noting that a general perception of failure in terms of direct legal effect can obscure the work that such initiatives do, or could do.

Framing failure as ‘generative’ rather than merely ‘critical’ brings into view differences in the style and tone of academic writing, which, as Les Back observes, is ‘often in a … hopeless key’.^[180] ‘A curious comfort’, Back suggests, ‘can reside in the critical certainty of pessimism’.^[181] Where this is the case, it may be taken to suggest a ‘relinquishing’ of responsibility for hope in the present,^[182] both in the subject matter that scholarship addresses and in the orientations it adopts. The implications of this are explored next.

B. What hope asks of environmental law scholarship

Thinking from hope invites consideration not only of the orientation of environmental law scholarship but also of its style and tone, and their implications. This matters because academic work has a performative dimension. By ‘performative’ I do not mean ‘done for show’, as it is sometimes understood, but rather that it has the potential to generate its own effects.^[183] When it is said that ‘methods are never innocent’,^[184] what is meant is that the methods of social inquiry ‘do not simply describe the world as it is, but also enact it’.^[185] This is captured in Liora Lazarus’s characterisation of ‘constitutional scholars as constitutional actors’,^[186] reflecting the roles that those scholars play in enhancing judicial accountability, setting professional norms, scrutinising constitutional reasoning and facilitating democratic debate.^[187] It is on this basis that Lazarus argues that ‘constitutional scholarship is constitutive of the constitutional order itself’.^[188]

This underscores the need for scholars to exercise ‘self-awareness’, including ‘a consciousness of the use of their authority in this public realm’.^[189] Similarly, Simpson reflects on the significance that may attach to what scholars of international law say and think:

As teachers of international law, in particular, we have in our care each year hundreds of students. For some, our course will be their only exposure to sustained reflection about global politics. There is a responsibility and power in this.^[190]

In environmental law, Fisher makes a comparable argument for lawyers and scholars to recognise the importance of their choices – about the methods used, the materials collected, the questions posed, the voices listened to and the audiences addressed – contending that ‘all those choices are normative choices about what is important in environmental law’.^[191] These involve elements of individual discretion, but they are also shaped by the institutional environment and disciplinary norms.^[192]

If, as this suggests, environmental law scholarship, including teaching, can have effects and help to bring particular realities ‘into being’^[193] (perhaps while ‘eroding others’^[194]), then this raises the question:

[W]hich realities might we try to enact? Neo-classical ones? Ameliorist agendas? Revolutionary realities? Anti-patriarchal or post-colonial worlds? Realities composed of post-structuralist partialities and shifting identities? Cyborg-like and materially heterogenous worlds? These are just a few of the possibilities.^[195]

Might hopefulness be included among these possibilities? This question sits within a broader conversation about the conventions and ethos of academic critique, one that has prompted a ‘critique of critique’ and an exploration of alternatives. In literary and cultural studies, for instance, Rita Felski laments the ‘lopsidedness’^[196] of intellectual work, referring, among other things, to its tendency towards negativity and the ‘sovereignty of suspicion’^[197] in reading and interpreting texts. Felski observes that a suspicious reading practice is marked by ‘distance rather than closeness; guardedness rather than openness; aggression rather than submission; superiority rather than reverence; attentiveness rather than distraction; exposure rather than tact’.^[198] Felski elaborates:

[S]cholars are all too adept at documenting the insufficiencies of meanings, values, and norms; like tenacious bloodhounds, we sniff out coercion, collusion, or exclusion at every turn. We are often stymied, however, when asked to account for the importance of meaning, values, and norms in all forms of life, including our own.^[199]

The problem with suspicious, deconstructive critique is not, Felski stresses, necessarily its negativity. It is its ‘charisma’ or ‘aura of … exemplarity’,^[200] and what that implies about other modes of thought in ways that undermine their credibility. As a result, alternatives to deconstructive critique are often said to involve ‘gullibility, blind faith, and slavish compliance’.^[201] Yet, as Felski notes, such alternatives need not be so restrictively viewed.^[202] They can include, for example, forms of ‘reparative reading’,^[203] offered as an antidote to ‘paranoid reading’,^[204] as well as ‘reading generously – with the grain’.^[205]

Although neither ‘reparative’ nor ‘generous’ readings may sound especially lawyerly (unlike the more ‘adversarial’^[206] or ‘combative’^[207] style of suspicious reading), such approaches have nonetheless found resonance in legal scholarship. André Dao and Danish Sheikh, for example, take up the challenge of ‘(re-)engaging with law in a spirit of wonder and vitality’ and of locating hopeful possibilities not in opposition to legal critique but in productive relationship with it.^[208] As Cooper points out, the aim of this move is ‘not to set up a dichotomy between hopeful and critical orientations’.^[209] Instead, it is to consider the question ‘if we want to orient ourselves, in our writing, to a more hopeful world, what kind of methodologies might support this task’.^[210]

Within Third World Approaches to International Law (TWAIL), questions about hope and its role in critical scholarship have been taken up in a variety of ways. Karin Mickelson, for example, argues that ‘the TWAIL project as a whole is deeply marked by hope’,^[211] especially at the present time, when optimism and faith in international law are said to have been all but lost. Contemporary TWAIL analysis, Mickelson says, is ‘still somehow clinging to hope’^[212] in the face of today’s seemingly overwhelming challenges, as a means of galvanising action and of building connection and community.^[213]

Other TWAIL scholars have expressed greater scepticism about the turn to hope. Naz Khatoon Modirzadeh describes, for example, how hope can sustain an unhelpful type of scholarship, concerned less with transforming the tools and institutions of international law than with nurturing ‘the personal and spiritual well-being of the critical academic self’.^[214] For Modirzadeh, ‘[t]he logic, aesthetics, and mood of this critical subculture are strikingly similar to what one might find at an expensive wellness retreat’.^[215] This is not to say that questions of wellness should be regarded as unimportant to what scholars do. It is, however, a stark reminder that ‘hopeful’ scholarship is neither uncontroversial nor a panacea, and that appeals to hope can sit uneasily, and at times harmfully, alongside traditions of critique and practices of resistance.

In this wider context, environmental law scholarship has begun to reflect more explicitly on questions of scholarly orientation and tone. For instance, there are thoughtful accounts of how the worsening state of the global environment is reflected not just in the subject matter of environmental law scholarship but also in the emotional register of what, and how, environmental law scholars write. As has been observed, ‘both individually and collectively, we are beginning to reflect our deeper concerns in our writings’, with some conveying ‘a sense of urgency and activism’.^[216] Emily Barritt, for example, highlights how ‘the dramatic nature of the Anthropocene has produced a distinct set of scholarly responses’.^[217] Much of this scholarship is, as Barritt puts it, ‘burdened with despair’, but that ‘is not the stopping point’^[218] – leaving open the possibility of ‘the scholarly pursuit of hopeful responses to terrifying geological futures’.^[219] Together these accounts invite reflection on whether hopeful responses might be understood not only as a possibility – but also, more tentatively, as a responsibility.

This builds on an earlier argument about the ‘epistemic responsibility’^[220] of environmental lawyers and scholars, while also taking up calls for the field to acknowledge a place for emotion in scholarly work.^[221] It further resonates with Marcus Morgan’s claim, made in relation to sociology, that scholars have ‘an ongoing social responsibility to draw out emergent strands of hope for their analyses’.^[222] On this view, sociology is not merely well placed to imagine and debate ‘what something better might be like’, but it is also obliged to do so.^[223] By the same logic, the field of environmental law is every bit as well placed, and likewise obliged. Environmental law ‘in the service of hope’^[224] is not, as is now becoming clear, positive for its own sake, nor does it ‘bind lack of hope to being profound’.^[225] It may ‘never look away from the trouble’,^[226] even as it attends to what else is possible. If that sounds like a challenge, it is because it is. It is a challenge that is held collectively,^[227] and encountered across all aspects of our work.

4. Conclusion

The title of this article is a ‘leading question’, as Felski puts it, combining ‘exhortation … with a whiff of exasperation’.^[228] I arrived at it in that spirit, with some scepticism, but also with the sense that there might be more to reflect on in relation to environmental law at a time when reasons for hope can feel elusive. Drawing on the contributions of others, I have sought to create further space for thinking differently about environmental law – including by paying attention to the manner and mood of academic argument, and to how these set the tone for scholarly engagement with the world.

Returning briefly to the discussion of teaching, our students at the start of the environmental law course are not accepting of the status quo, and they often see hope in what law might do to change it. If, on completing the module, all hope were lost, that would not just be a cause for regret – it would signal a failure in our teaching and in their learning. For that reason, it is important, not just for teaching but also for research, to take seriously the more nebulous character of what it means to engage with environmental law and, in Simpson’s words, to take ‘the emotional pulse of the work we do’.^[229]

The analysis suggests that hope can appear in different ways and in different orientations. Thinking towards hope treats hope as an object of inquiry. Thinking from hope takes it as a point of departure – one that can inform method as well as a sense of responsibility. From either perspective, hope need not be realised in order to matter. It can remain provisional and exposed to disappointment, and still be significant in the ways in which it figures in legal thought and practice. Each orientation – towards and from hope – poses difficulties, but together they bring into focus the care required in how hope is handled in environmental law and environmental law scholarship. Ali Smith captures the precariousness of this position in her description of hope as ‘a tightrope across a ravine between a here and a there, and that tightrope’s as sharp as a knife blade’.^[230] Keeping environmental law on that tightrope is, I suggest, a current legal problem.

1. On this point, see Stef Jansen, ‘The Anthropology of Hope’, Oxford Research Encyclopedias (2021). ↑

2. See eg Matthew Sparke, ‘Forum: Geopolitical Fears, Geoeconomic Hopes, and the Responsibilities of Geography’ (2007) 97(2) Annals of the Association of American Geographers 338; Paulo Ravecca and Elizabeth Dauphinee, ‘What is Left for Critique? On the Perils of Innocence in Neoliberal Times’ (2022) 11(1) Las Torres de Lucca 37; Mathias Thaler, ‘Eco-Miserabilism and Radical Hope: On the Utopian Vision of Post-Apocalyptic Environmentalism’ (2024) 118(1) American Political Science Review 318. ↑

3. For discussion, see Lawrence T Nicholas, ‘Editor’s Introduction: Hope, Theory and Positive Sociology’ (2023) 54 The American Sociologist 1. Relatedly, Steve Derné and others, ‘Beyond Disenchantment: Toward a Sociology of Wonder’ (2022) 92(4) Sociological Inquiry 1251. ↑

4. See eg Michaela Haug, ‘Framing the Future through the Lens of Hope: Environmental Change, Diverse Hopes and the Challenge of Engagement’ (2020) 145 Journal of Social and Cultural Anthropology 71. For context, see Sherry B Ortner, ‘Dark Anthropology and its Others: Theory Since the Eighties’ (2016) 6(1) Journal of Ethnographic Theory 47, esp 58–60. ↑

5. See eg Rosi Braidotti, ‘Posthuman Affirmative Politics’ in SE Wilmer and Audronė Žukauskaitė (eds), Resisting Biopolitics: Philosophical, Political, and Performative Strategies (Routledge 2016) ch 2. ↑

6. See eg Naomi Hodgson, Joris Vlieghe and Piotr Zamojski, Manifesto for a Post-Critical Pedagogy (punctum books 2017); Stefano Oliverio and Bianca Thoilliez, ‘Post-Critical Pedagogy: A Philosophical and Epistemological Identikit’ (2024) 58(6) Journal of Philosophy of Education 1029; Dianne Mulcahy and Leanne Higham, ‘Beyond Conventional Critique in Education: Embracing the Affirmative’ (2025) 66(5) Critical Studies in Education 610. ↑

7. Inspired by Annelise Riles, ‘Is the Law Hopeful?’ in Hirokazu Miyazaki and Richard Swedberg (eds), The Economy of Hope (University of Pennsylvania Press 2016) ch 5. ↑

8. See eg Jens Newig, ‘Symbolic Environmental Legislation and Societal Self-Deception’ (2007) 16(2) Environmental Politics 276. ↑

9. Parallels may be drawn with Sheila Jasanoff’s analysis of objectivity in policy-relevant knowledge as actively produced through practice; see Sheila Jasanoff, ‘The Practices of Objectivity in Regulatory Science’ in Charles Camic, Neil Gross and Michèle Lamont (eds), Social Knowledge in the Making (University of Chicago Press 2011) ch 10. Accounts of hope as active or practised include Patrick Shade, Habits of Hope: A Pragmatic Theory (Vanderbilt University Press 2001); Martha C Nussbaum, The Monarchy of Fear: A Philosopher Looks at Our Political Crisis (OUP 2018) ch 7; Mariame Kaba, We Do This ’Til We Free Us: Abolitionist Organizing and Transforming Justice (Haymarket Books 2021) pt I ‘Hope is a Discipline’. ↑

10. For critique, see Naz Khatoon Modirzadeh, ‘“Let Us All Agree to Die a Little”: TWAIL’s Unfulfilled Promise’ (2023) 65(1) Harvard International Law Journal 79, esp 107–14. ↑

11. See generally Terry Eagleton, Hope Without Optimism (Yale University Press 2017) esp ch 4. ↑

12. See generally Ben Anderson, ‘Affective Atmospheres’ (2009) 2 Emotion, Space and Society 77. ↑

13. For qualitative methodological work on vibes, see Ash Watson, ‘Vibes-based Methods’ (2025) 25(6) Qualitative Research 1326. ↑

14. Martin Dixon, Modern Land Law (11th edn, Routledge 2018) 12. ↑

15. Emma Lees, The Principles of Land Law (OUP 2020) 1. ↑

16. Dixon (n 15) 12. ↑

17. Kevin Gray and Susan Francis Gray, Land Law (7th edn, OUP 2011) v. ↑

18. Elizabeth Fisher, ‘Legal Imagination and Teaching’ in Lavanya Rajamani and Jacqueline Peel (eds), The Oxford Handbook of International Environmental Law (2nd edn, OUP 2021) ch 8, 139. ↑

19. ibid esp 140–44. See also Elizabeth Fisher, ‘Telling Meaningful Stories About Climate Change and Public Law’ (2025) 37(1) Journal of Environmental Law 1, 7. ↑

20. James Boyd White, The Legal Imagination: Studies in the Nature of Legal Thought and Expression (45th Anniversary Edition, Wolters Kluwer 2018) xxii: ‘law is not merely a system of rules and principles … but a whole cluster of habits of mind and expression’. ↑

21. Gerry Simpson, The Sentimental Life of International Law: Literature, Language, and Longing in World Politics (OUP 2021) 12. ↑

22. ibid esp 6–11. ↑

23. ibid 3. ↑

24. ibid 148. ↑

25. ibid 3. ↑

26. For discussion, see Aziz Z Huq, ‘What We Ask of Law’ (2022) 132 The Yale Law Journal 487. ↑

27. Robert K Merton, as cited in Richard Swedberg, ‘Theorizing in Sociological Research: A New Perspective, a New Departure?’ (2017) 43 Annual Review of Sociology 189, 192. For source, see Robert K Merton, ‘Three Fragments from a Sociologist’s Notebooks: Establishing the Phenomenon, Specified Ignorance, and Strategic Research Materials (1987) 13 Annual Review of Sociology 1. ↑

28. Robert K Merton, as quoted in Erika Duncan, ‘Encounters: A Summation from the Patron Saint of Sociology’ The New York Times (New York, 16 April 1995). ↑

29. ibid. ↑

30. Eagleton (n 12) 39. ↑

31. See eg CR Snyder (ed), Handbook of Hope: Theory, Measures and Applications (Academic Press 2000); CR Snyder, ‘Hope Theory: Rainbows in the Mind’ (2002) 13(4) Psychological Inquiry 249. In the context of climate change, see eg Maria Ojala, ‘Hope and Climate-Change Engagement from a Psychological Perspective’ (2023) 49 Current Opinion in Psychology 101514. ↑

32. See eg Daniel N Silva and Rodrigo Borba, ‘Sociolinguistics of Hope: Language Between the No-More and the Not-Yet’ (2024) 53(5) Language in Society 775. In environmental discourse, see Therese Åhlvik and others, ‘When Hope Messages Become the Discursive Norm: How Repertoires of Hope Shape Communicative Capacity in Conversations on the Circular Economy’ (2024) 67(9) Journal of Environmental Planning and Management 2017. ↑

33. See eg Sara Ahmed, The Cultural Politics of Emotion (2nd edn, Edinburgh University Press 2014) esp ch 7; Lauren Berlant, Cruel Optimism (Duke University Press 2011) esp 13–14 where Berlant notes the significance of arguments about hope. ↑

34. See eg Jürgen Moltmann, Theology of Hope: On the Grounds and the Implications of a Christian Eschatology (James W Leitch tr, SCM Press 1967); Ernst Bloch, The Principle of Hope, vol 1 (Neville Plaice, Stephen Plaice and Paul Knight tr, MIT Press 1986); Hesiod, Theogony and Works and Days (ML West tr, OUP 1988) 35–61. ↑

35. Nauja Kleist and Stef Jansen, ‘Introduction: Hope over Time – Crisis, Immobility and Future-Making’ (2016) 27(4) History and Anthropology 373, 373. ↑

36. Jansen (n 2). ↑

37. Guido Gili and Emiliana Mangone, Towards a Sociology of Hope: Looking Beyond (Routledge 2025); Adrian Scribano, Sociology of Hope: A New Theory (Routledge 2026). ↑

38. David Hicks, ‘A Geography of Hope’ (2014) 99(1) Geography 5; Julianne A Hazlewood, Beth Rose Middleton Manning and Jennifer J Casolo, ‘Geographies of Hope-in-Praxis: Collaboratively Decolonizing Relations and Regenerating Relational Spaces’ (2023) 6(3) Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space 1417. ↑

39. Hirokazu Miyazaki and Richard Swedberg (eds), The Economy of Hope (University of Pennsylvania Press 2016). ↑

40. Nik Brown, ‘Shifting Tenses: Reconnecting Regimes of Truth and Hope’ (2005) 13(3) Configurations 331; Carlos Novas, ‘Genetic Advisory Groups, Science and Biovalue: Creating Political Economies of Hope’ in Paul Atkinson, Peter Glasner and Helen Greenslade (eds), New Genetics, New Identities (Routledge 2007) ch 2; Marjo Lindroth and Heidi Sinevaara-Niskanen, The Colonial Politics of Hope: Critical Junctures of Indigenous-State Relations (Routledge 2024). ↑

41. Some early examples include Kathryn Abrams and Hila Keren, ‘Law in the Cultivation of Hope’ (2007) 95(2) California Law Review 391; Riles (n 8). More recent scholarship reflects a more sustained engagement with hope in law, including Karin Mickelson, ‘Hope in a TWAIL Register’ (2020) 1 Third World Approaches to International Law Review 14; Bronwen Morgan and Amelia Thorpe, ‘Place-based Pedagogies of Hope’ (2022) 18(4) International Journal of Law in Context 427; Emily Barritt, ‘The Drama of the Anthropocene: Despair and Hope in Legal Scholarship’ in Josephine van Zeben and Chris Hilson (eds), A Research Agenda for Environmental Law (Elgar 2025) ch 2; Sarah Trotter, ‘Thinking Through Hope in Law: An Introduction and a Welcome to this Special Issue of the LSE Law Working Paper Series’ (2025) LSE Legal Studies Working Paper No 22/2025. ↑

42. Eagleton (n 12) 2. ↑

43. ibid 3. ↑

44. ibid 59. ↑

45. ibid 3. ↑

46. Jansen (n 2). ↑

47. Rebecca Bryant and Daniel M Knight, The Anthropology of the Future (CUP 2019) 134. ↑

48. See eg Marta Soniewicka, ‘The Politics of Hope: Utopia as an Exercise in Social Imagination’ in Bart van Klink, Marta Soniewicka and Leon van den Broeke (eds), Utopian Thinking in Law, Politics, Architecture and Technology: Hope in a Hopeless World (Edward Elgar Publishing 2022) ch 6. ↑

49. The literature is extensive and spans multiple disciplines. For a sense of the field overall, see eg Anna Abraham (ed), The Cambridge Handbook of the Imagination (CUP 2020); Amy Kind and Julia Langkau (eds), The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy of Imagination and Creativity (OUP 2026). ↑

50. Anna Abraham, ‘The Imaginative Mind’ (2016) 37 Human Brain Mapping 4197, 4207; Britta Krüger, Mathias Hegele and Martina Rieger, ‘The Multisensory Nature of Human Action Imagery’ (2022) 88 Psychological Research 1870, 1870. ↑

51. Jessica R Andrews-Hanna and Matthew D Grilli, ‘Mapping the Imaginative Mind: Charting New Paths Forward’ (2021) 30(1) Current Directions in Psychological Science 82, 82. ↑

52. Maksymilian Del Mar, Artefacts of Legal Inquiry: The Value of Imagination in Adjudication (Hart Publishing 2020) 125. ↑

53. Ed Finn and others, ‘Applied Imagination’ (2023) 14 Frontiers in Psychology 1275942. ↑

54. See eg Valerie Braithwaite, ‘The Hope Process and Social Inclusion’ (2004) 592 Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 128, 129: ‘with hope as the energizer of our actions’. ↑

55. For critique, see Davina Cooper, ‘Keeping Prefigurative Law in Play: Utopianism, Failure, and the Problem of Legal Sex’ (2026) Law and Social Inquiry 1, 11. ↑

56. ibid 2. ↑

57. Ruth Levitas, Utopia as Method: The Imaginary Reconstitution of Society (Palgrave Macmillan 2013) 3. ↑

58. See especially Levitas (n 58); Davina Cooper, Everyday Utopias: The Conceptual Life of Promising Spaces (Duke University Press 2014). ↑

59. Eagleton (n 12) 49. ↑

60. For a detailed discussion, see Darren Webb, ‘Hope and the Utopian Impulse’ in Nancy E Snow, The Virtue of Hope (OUP 2024) ch 9, esp 279–80 on Bloch. ↑

61. Jakob Huber, ‘Imaginative Hope’ (2025) 11(1) Journal of the American Philosophical Association 154. ↑

62. Rebecca Coleman, ‘Austerity Futures: Debt, Temporality and (Hopeful) Pessimism as an Austerity Mood’ (2015) 897 New Formations 83, esp 98–101; Mara van der Lugt, Hopeful Pessimism (Princeton University Press 2025). ↑

63. See eg Cooper (n 59); Austin Sarat, Lawrence Douglas and Martha Merill Umphrey (eds), Law and the Utopian Imagination (Stanford University Press 2014); Del Mar (n 53); Elizabeth Fisher, ‘Going Backward, Looking Forward: An Essay on How to Think About Law Reform in Ecologically Precarious Times’ (2022) 30(30) New Zealand Universities Law Review 111; van Klink, Soniewicka and van den Broeke (n 49). ↑

64. See eg Susan A Bandes and others (eds), Research Handbook on Law and Emotion (Edward Elgar 2021); Sharyn Roach Anleu and Kathy Mack, Judging and Emotion: A Socio-Legal Analysis (Routledge 2021). Hope is not universally regarded as an emotion (see eg Eagleton (n 12) 55–56), though there is broad agreement that it constitutes a complex state involving cognitive, affective and motivational elements to differing degrees. ↑

65. Fisher (n 20) esp 11–12. ↑

66. ibid 12. ↑

67. Drawing on Ben Anderson and Adam Holden, ‘Affective Urbanism and the Event of Hope’ (2008) 11(2) Space and Culture 142. ↑

68. Drawing on Nicola Lacey, ‘Institutionalising Interpersonal Ideas in Law’ (2025) 88(1) Modern Law Review 3. ↑

69. See eg Monica Feria-Tinta, A Barrister for the Earth: Ten Cases of Hope for Our Future (Faber 2025). ↑

70. See eg Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Climate Change 2023: Synthesis Report (IPCC 2023) esp 3.1.3. ↑

71. See eg Horst WJ Rittel and Melvin M Webber, ‘Dilemmas in a General Theory of Planning’ (1973) 4 Policy Studies 155; Peter J Balint and others (eds), Wicked Environmental Problems: Managing Uncertainty and Conflict (Princeton University Press 2011). ↑

72. See eg Richard J Lazarus, ‘Super Wicked Problems and Climate Change: Restraining the Super Wicked Problems and Climate Change: Restraining the Present to Liberate the Future’ (2009) 94 Cornell Law Review 1153. ↑

73. Elizabeth Fisher, Eloise Scotford and Emily Barritt, ‘The Legally Disruptive Nature of Climate Change’ (2017) 80(2) Modern Law Review 173. ↑

74. See generally Sheila Jasanoff, ‘Technologies of Humility’ (2007) 450 Nature 33; Sheila Jasanoff, ‘Serviceable Truths: Science for Action in Law and Policy’ (2015) 93(7) Texas Law Review 1723. ↑

75. See eg Louis J Kotzé and Sam Adelman, ‘Environmental Law and the Unsustainability of Sustainable Development: A Tale of Disenchantment and of Hope’ (2023) 34 Law and Critique 227. ↑

76. Eagleton (n 12) 114. ↑

77. Anderson and Holden (n 68). ↑

78. ibid 149. ↑

79. In science and technology studies, see eg Mads Borup and others, ‘The Sociology of Expectations in Science and Technology’ (2006) 18(3/4) Technology Analysis and Strategic Management 285–98; Harro van Lente, Charlotte Spitters and Alexander Peine, ‘Comparing Technological Hype Cycles: Towards a Theory’ (2013) 80(8) Technological Forecasting and Social Change 1615–1628. In environmental law, see eg Sanja Bogojević, ‘Ending the Honeymoon: Deconstructing Emissions Trading Discourses’ (2009) 21(3) Journal of Environmental Law 443. ↑

80. Conor Gearty, ‘Living in Hope: Does a Right to Hope Make Sense?’ (2025) LSE Legal Studies Working Paper No 41/2025, 1. ↑

81. Kim Bouwer, ‘The Unsexy Future of Climate Change Litigation’ (2018) 30 Journal of Environmental Law 483, 489. ↑

82. Fisher (n 20) 9. ↑

83. Obligations of States in respect of Climate Change, Advisory Opinion, 2025 ICJ (23 July 2025). ↑

84. Margaretha Wewerinke-Singh and Jorge Viñuales, ‘The Great Reset: The ICJ Reframes the Conduct Responsible for Climate Change Through the Prism of Internationally Wrongful Acts’ (EJIL:Talk!, 4 August 2025) <https://www.ejiltalk.org/the-great-reset-the-icj-reframes-the-conduct-responsible-for-climate-change-through-the-prism-of-internationally-wrongful-acts/> accessed 12 May 2026. ↑

85. Siobhan McDonnell, ‘Renewed Hope: Why the ICJ Climate Decision Matters to Us All’ (DevPolicy Blog, 24 July 2025) <https://devpolicy.org/renewed-hope-why-the-icj-climate-decision-matters-to-us-all/> accessed 12 May 2026. ↑

86. Verein KlimaSeniorinnen Schweiz and Others v Switzerland [2024] ECHR 304, App no 53600/20. ↑

87. Margaretha Wewerinke-Singh, ‘Climate Protection Obligations under the European Convention on Human Rights: The KlimaSeniorinnen Judgment’ (2025) 21(2) European Constitutional Law Review 356, 373. ↑

88. KlimaSeniorinnen (n 87) Partly Concurring Partly Dissenting Opinion of Judge Eicke, para 69, emph added. ↑

89. See generally Gerald N Rosenberg, The Hollow Hope: Can Courts Bring About Social Change? (3rd edn, University of Chicago Press 2023). ↑

90. Ben Anderson, ‘Governing Emergencies: The Politics of Delay and the Logic of Response’ (2016) 41(1) Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 14, 21. ↑

91. Ben Anderson, ‘The Affects of the Disaster’ (2020) 78 Political Geography 102172. ↑

92. Anderson (n 91) 18. ↑

93. Bristol City Council, Minutes of the Full Council, 13 November 2018 at 6.00pm, Motion 2 – Declare a Climate Emergency. ↑

94. Bristol One City Environment Board, One City Ecological Emergency Strategy (Bristol One City 2020) 1. ↑

95. Environmental Law Foundation (ELF), Local Urgency on the Climate Emergency? A Review of Local Authority Climate Emergency Declarations and Supporting Action Across the UK (ELF 2021) 5. ↑

96. HC Early Day Motion 2177, ‘UK-Wide Climate Emergency’ (2017–19) HC Deb 1 May 2019, vol 659. ↑

97. Llywodraeth Cymru (Welsh Government), Cabinet written statement (Lesley Griffiths, Minister for Environment, Energy and Rural Affairs), ‘Welsh Government Declares Climate Emergency’, 30 April 2019; Riaghaltas na h-Alba (Scottish Government), ‘The Global Climate Emergency – Scotland’s Response: Climate Change Secretary Roseanna Cunningham’s statement’, 14 May 2019; Northern Ireland Assembly, Minutes of Proceedings, 9.1 Motion: Climate Emergency, 3 February 2020. ↑

98. Judy Bush and Andréanne Doyon, ‘Climate Emergency Declarations by Local Governments – What Comes Next?’ (2025) 4 npj Climate Action 4. ↑

99. Jocelyn Stacey, ‘The Public Law Paradoxes of Climate Emergency Declarations’ (2022) 11(2) Transnational Environmental Law 291, 291. ↑

100. See eg Climate and Ecology HC Bill (2019–21) [172] cls 1, 2, 4. ↑

101. See eg Marks & Spencer Plc v Secretary of State for Levelling Up Housing and Communities [2024] EWHC 452 (Admin) para 12. For discussion, see Richard Honey KC and Mark O’Brien O’Reilly, ‘The Potential Legal Effect of Declarations of Climate Emergency’ (Francis Taylor Building, 24 March 2022) <https://www.ftbchambers.co.uk/news/blog-view/the-potential-legal-effect-of-declarations-of-climate-emergency> accessed 17 June 2026. ↑

102. Lacey (n 69) 27. ↑

103. ibid 4. ↑

104. ibid 25–26. ↑

105. Vinter and others v UK (App nos 66069/09, 130/10 and 3896/10). See also Sarah Trotter, ‘Hope’s Relations: A Theory of the “Right to Hope” in European Human Rights Law’ (2022) 22(2) Human Rights Law Review 1; Sarah Trotter, ‘Living with a Sense of a Right to Hope’ (2024) 34(5) Social and Legal Studies 635. ↑

106. For discussion, see Colin Reid, ‘A New Sort of Duty? The Significance of “Outcome” Duties in the Climate Change and Child Poverty Acts’ (2012) 4 Public Law 749; Chris Hilson, ‘Hitting the Target? Analysing the Use of Targets in Climate Law’ (2020) 32(2) Journal of Environmental Law 195; Maria Lee, ‘Politics and Expertise: New Environmental Targets in English Environmental Law’ in Josephine van Zeben and Chris Hilson (eds), A Research Agenda for Environmental Law (Elgar 2025) ch 8. ↑

107. Environment Act 2021, s 1(3). ↑

108. Environment Act 2021, ss 2 and 3. ↑

109. Environmental Targets (Marine Protected Areas) Regulations 2023, reg 3(2)(a). ↑

110. Office for Environmental Protection, A Review of Implementation of the Water Framework Directive Regulations and River Basin Management Planning in England (OEP 2024) 4.2.1. See eg Environment Agency, ‘River Basin Management Plans: Updated 2022’ (Environment Agency 2022), pursuant to the Water Environment (Water Framework Directive) (England and Wales) Regulations 2017, esp reg 13 and Pt 6. ↑

111. Environment Agency (n 111). ↑

112. Climate Change Act 2008, s 1(1). ↑

113. David Feldman, ‘Legislation Which Bears No Law’ (2016) 37(3) Statute Law Review 212, 214. ↑

114. Catherine Callaghan, ‘What is a Target Duty?’ (2000) 5(3) Judicial Review 184, 184. ↑

115. Reid (n 107) 759. ↑

116. Aileen McHarg, ‘Climate Change Constitutionalism? Lessons from the United Kingdom’ (2011) 2 Climate Law 469, 478. ↑

117. See, however, Jonathan Church, ‘Enforcing the Climate Change Act’ (2015) 4(1) UCL Journal of Law and Jurisprudence 109, esp 115–29, for further detail. ↑

118. Emma Lees and Ole W Pedersen, ‘Performative Environmental Law’ (2025) 88(1) Modern Law Review 124, 147. ↑

119. ibid. ↑

120. See generally Antonin Lacelle-Webster, ‘A Democratic Theory of Hope: Collective Agency in Uncertain Times’ (PhD thesis, University of British Columbia 2024–25) esp 3.4. ↑

121. Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) Environmental Improvement Plan (EIP) 2025 (Defra 2025) Commitment 17. ↑

122. Brown (n 41) 334; Jansen (n 2). ↑

123. Jansen (n 2). ↑

124. Lael K Weis, ‘Environmental Constitutionalism: Aspiration or Transformation?’ (2018) 16(3) International Journal of Constitutional Law 836, 837. See also Lael K Weis and Robert Mullins, ‘Does Nature Need Rights?’ (2025) 45(4) Oxford Journal of Legal Studies 839, esp 842–47. ↑

125. Tarunabh Khaitan, ‘Directive Principles and the Expressive Accommodation of Ideological Dissenters’ (2018) 16(2) International Journal of Constitutional Law 389, 395. ↑

126. Weis (n 125). ↑

127. Constitution of Bolivia 2009, art 342. ↑

128. Constitution of Kenya 2010, art 69(1)(b). ↑

129. Weis (n 125) 838. ↑

130. Khaitan (n 126) 397. ↑

131. ibid 416. ↑

132. Thanks to Chris Hilson for suggesting this phrasing, as adapted from Elizabeth Fisher, ‘Precaution, Precaution Everywhere: Developing a “Common Understanding” of the Precautionary Principle in the European Community’ (2002) 9(1) Maastricht Journal of European and Comparative Law 7, 7. ↑

133. Jansen (n 2). ↑

134. Darren Webb, ‘Modes of Hoping’ (2007) 20(3) History of the Human Sciences 65, 80. ↑

135. Jansen (n 2). ↑

136. I am grateful to Sonam Gordhan and Kenta Tsuda for conversations following the lecture, which prompted reflection on how different degrees and directions of hope may coexist within the same legal context, and on the potential misalignment between hope as contained in legal doctrine and hope as law is taken up and mobilised in practice. ↑

137. For related discussion of the unequal ‘capacity to aspire’, see Arjun Appadurai, The Future as Cultural Fact: Essays on the Global Condition (Verso 2013) ch 9. ↑

138. Ghassan Hage, Against Paranoid Nationalism: Searching for Hope in a Shrinking Society (Pluto Press 2003) 13, emph original. ↑

139. Ghassan Hage, ‘Questions Concerning a Future-Politics’ (2016) 27(4) History and Anthropology 465, 466. ↑

140. Chelsea Watego, Another Day in the Colony (University of Queensland Press 2021) esp ch 6. ↑

141. Jansen (n 2). ↑

142. Braithwaite (n 55). ↑

143. Levitas (n 58) 112. ↑

144. ibid 120. ↑

145. ibid 18. ↑

146. ibid 7. ↑

147. ibid 83. ↑

148. Cooper (n 59) 88, emph original. ↑

149. ibid esp 31–39. ↑

150. Hirokazu Miyazaki, The Method of Hope: Anthropology, Philosophy, and Fijian Knowledge (Stanford University Press 2004) vii. For the use of ‘thinking from hope’ in a different context, see Ben Anderson, ‘Becoming and Being Hopeful: Towards a Theory of Affect’ (2006) 24(5) Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 733, esp 747–50. ↑

151. Miyazaki (n 151) esp 12–16. ↑

152. Stef Jansen, ‘For a Relational, Historical Ethnography of Hope: Indeterminacy and Determination in the Bosnian and Herzegovinian Meantime’ (2016) 27(4) History and Anthropology 447, esp 449–51. ↑

153. Miyazaki (n 151) 3. ↑

154. ibid 7, 22–23. ↑

155. Riles (n 8) 126–27. ↑

156. ibid 142. ↑

157. ibid 133–37. ↑

158. ibid 140. ↑

159. ibid. ↑

160. ibid 141. ↑

161. ibid 140. ↑

162. ibid 128. ↑

163. ibid 141. ↑

164. Robin Wagner-Pacifici, Theorizing the Standoff: Contingency in Action (CUP 2009) ch 1, 3. ↑

165. Adam B Seligman and others, ‘Ritual and the Subjunctive’ in Adam B Seligman and others, Ritual and its Consequences: An Essay on the Limits of Sincerity (OUP 2008) ch 1, 21. See also Fernanda Pirie, ‘Why the Rule of Law? A Historical Perspective’ (2024) 12(2) Comparative Legal History 136, esp 138–39; Ben Golder, ‘The Politics of Legal Form: An Essay on Subjunctive Jurisprudence’ (2025) 51(1) Australian Feminist Law Journal 27. ↑

166. Golder (n 166). ↑

167. Nicole Rogers and Michelle Maloney (eds), Law as if Earth Really Mattered: The Wild Law Judgment Project (Routledge 2017). ↑

168. Helen Dancer , Bonnie Holligan and Helena Howe (eds), UK Earth Law Judgments (Hart Publishing 2024). ↑

169. Nicole Rogers and Michelle Maloney (eds), The Anthropocene Judgments Project: Futureproofing the Common Law (Routledge 2024). ↑

170. Baroness Hale of Richmond commenting on the Feminist Judgments Project, Select Committee on the Constitution, Judicial Appointments Process, Oral Evidence (2 November 2011) Q 222, as cited in Rosemary Hunter, ‘More than Just a Different Face? Judicial Diversity and Decision-Making’ (2015) 68(1) Current Legal Problems 119, 121. ↑

171. Amanda Kennedy and others (eds), Re-imagining Environmental Law (Elgar 2026). ↑

172. For discussion, see Cinnamon P Carlane, ‘Climate Courage: Remaking Environmental Law’ (2022) 41 Stanford Environmental Law Journal 125, esp pt IV. ↑

173. See eg David WJ Mckeown, ‘The Society-Nature Relations and Laws of Satoyama’ (PhD thesis, University of Bristol 2025) esp chs 5 and 8; Margherita Pieraccini, ‘Reimagining Notions of Public Governance through the Commons: The Role and Boundaries of Prefigurative Legality’ (forthcoming) Journal of Law and Society. ↑

174. Chiara Armeni, ‘Narratives as Tools of Legal Re-Imagination in the Climate Crisis’ (2021) 33 Journal of Environmental Law 485, 494. ↑

175. Christopher D Stone, ‘Should Trees Have Standing? Toward Legal Rights for Natural Objects’ (1972) 45 Southern California Law Review 450, 453. ↑

176. Mathias Thaler, ‘Utopia, Breakdown, Repair: Failure and Success in Social Dreaming’ (2023) 45(3) New Political Science 431, 437. See alternatively Martin Coward and Debbie Lisle, ‘Irretrievable Failure: Life in the Ruins of Utopian Dreaming’ (2025) European Journal of Social Theory <https://doi.org/10.1177/13684310251379196>. ↑

177. Victoria McGreer, ‘The Art of Good Hope’ (2004) 592 Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 100, 104. ↑

178. Amy J Cohen and Bronwen Morgan, ‘Prefigurative Legality’ (2023) 48(3) Law and Social Inquiry 1053, 1064. ↑

179. Les Back, ‘Hope’s Work’ (2021) 53(1) Antipode 3, 5. ↑

180. ibid 5. ↑

181. Marcus Morgan, ‘The Responsibility for Social Hope’ (2016) 136(1) Thesis Eleven 107, 118. ↑

182. Sara Ahmed, ‘The Nonperformativity of Antiracism’ (2006) 7(1) Meridians 104, 104. ↑

183. John Law and John Urry, ‘Enacting the Social’ (2004) 33(3) Economy and Society 390, 403. ↑

184. ibid 390. ↑

185. Liora Lazarus, ‘Constitutional Scholars as Constitutional Actors’ (2020) 48(4) Federal Law Review 483. ↑

186. ibid. ↑

187. ibid 490. ↑

188. ibid 494. ↑

189. Simpson (n 22) 4. ↑

190. Liz Fisher, ‘Environmental Law, Scholarship, and Epistemic Responsibility’ (2021) 33 Journal of Environmental Law 521, 527. ↑

191. ibid 528. ↑

192. Law and Urry (n 184) 393. ↑

193. ibid 397. ↑

194. ibid 396. ↑

195. Rita Felski, The Limits of Critique (University of Chicago Press 2015) 15. ↑

196. ibid 30. ↑

197. Rita Felski, ‘Critique and the Hermeneutics of Suspicion’ (2011) 15(1) M/C Journal. ↑

198. Felski (n 196) 15. ↑

199. Felski (n 198). ↑

200. Felski (n 196) 51. ↑

201. ibid 172–73. ↑

202. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity (Duke University Press 2003) ch 4. ↑

203. ibid. ↑

204. Timothy Bewes, ‘Reading with the Grain: A New World in Literary Criticism’ (2010) 21(3) differences 1, 28, emph added. ↑

205. Felski (n 196) 20. ↑

206. ibid 21. ↑

207. André Dao and Danish Sheikh, ‘Translating Dark into Bright: Diary of a Post-Critical Year’ (2024) 35 Law Critique 377, 380. ↑

208. Davina Cooper, ‘Can Projects of Reimagining Complement Critical Research?’ (20 April 2018) <https://davinascooper.wordpress.com/2018/04/20/can-projects-of-reimagining-complement-critical-research/> accessed 17 June 2026. ↑

209. ibid. ↑

210. Karin Mickelson, ‘Hope in a TWAIL Register’ (2020) 1 Third World Approaches to International Law Review 14, 25. ↑

211. ibid 17. ↑

212. ibid 25–27. ↑

213. Modirzadeh (n 11) 112. ↑

214. ibid 113. ↑

215. Duncan French, David L Dawson and Nima Golijani-Moghaddam, ‘Environmental Legal Research is Changing: Alternating Tenor/Terror of Scholarship, Despair and Self-Care’ (2023) 35(1) Journal of Environmental Law 139, 144. ↑

216. ibid 145. ↑

217. Barritt (n 42). ↑

218. ibid 9. ↑

219. Fisher (n 191). ↑

220. Chris Hilson, ‘The Role of Narrative in Environmental Law: The Nature of Tales and Tales of Nature’ (2022) 34(1) Journal of Environmental Law 1, 3. ↑

221. Morgan (n 182) 107–08, emph original. ↑

222. ibid 120. ↑

223. Back (n 180) 4. ↑

224. Mary Zournazi and Michael Taussig, ‘Carnival of the Senses: A Conversation with Michael Taussig’ in Zournazi (n 1) ch 2, 45. ↑

225. Back (n 180) 4. ↑

226. See generally Valerie Braithwaite, ‘Collective Hope’ (2004) 592 Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 6. ↑

227. Felski (196) 14. ↑

228. Simpson (n 22) 52. ↑

229. Kate Kellaway, ‘Ali Smith: “Hope is a Tightrope across a Ravine”’ The Guardian (1 May 2021). ↑