In response to the growing impacts of climate change (CC), countries are adopting increasingly invasive response measures, seriously impacting land rights. The weak rule-of-law environment that marks developing countries makes the implementation of CC response laws and policies particularly difficult, fragmented, and more likely to introduce new injustices, especially for vulnerable people. Yet, the law and the ‘law in practice’ is strikingly absent from existing research on the CC response–land rights nexus in developing countries.

Through empirical qualitative research combining legal analysis and ethnographic fieldwork in Mozambique and South Sudan – two of the countries most affected by CC – this socio-legal study focuses on the implementation of CC response laws and policies in developing countries with a weak rule-of-law environment, and their (unforeseen) effects on vulnerable peoples’ land rights.

The research will engage politicians, state officials, practitioners and vulnerable people affected by CC response. Scientifically, this research contribute new empirical cases that show, in the complex field of CC response, how state apparatuses work in practice and how citizens use the law, among other means, to influence states’ work.

Societally, this research provides politicians and state officials with actionable knowledge for improving CC response laws and policies, and equipes those most affected by CC, as well as their advocates, with knowledge for contesting ineffective and unfair CC response. These scientific and societal impacts are paramount to promoting effective and fair CC response and preventing it from becoming another source of dispossession, livelihood loss, and social injustice.

• climate change
• land rights
• rule of law
• socio-legal studies