Beyond the gavel, measuring the impact
Litigation’s impacts are neither immediate nor linear. A court decision doesn’t simply produce a direct outcome — it could trigger complex chains of effects that materialise across different domains, at different times, through mechanisms that are often indirect and difficult to trace, even before the decision is rendered. Identifying where impacts actually occur and recognising them when they emerge requires sophisticated analytical frameworks and interdisciplinary empirical research.
A framework that moves beyond existing taxonomies
Our framework of areas and sites of impact captures litigation’s multidimensional influences across distinct but interconnected domains. We identify where litigation’s effects materialise — in legal and policy, social and cultural, and economic domains — and trace how impacts in one sphere catalyse transformations in others.
Legal, judicial and policy
The regulatory space where litigation transforms the established legal frameworks of climate governance, affecting judicial interpretations of state and corporate responsibilities, legislative and regulatory developments, and policy implementation.
Social and cultural
The societal and relational space where litigation shapes public discourse about climate responsibilities, mobilises civic engagement and reconfigures the expectations placed on governments and corporations alike.
Economic
The market space where litigation influences corporate strategies and industry practices, affecting individual firm performance and broader market responses to climate-related risks and opportunities.
One dataset, three disciplinary lenses
Our interdisciplinary team of legal scholars, sociologists and economists will analyse the same dataset of cases simultaneously through their distinct methodological lenses, working with standardised analytical tools — Individual Case Impact Charts and Aggregate Case Impact Charts — that enable genuine integration while preserving disciplinary rigour. This synchronised approach will reveal patterns invisible to single-discipline analysis.
Individual Case Impact Charts (ICIC)
At case level, the ICIC records the observed effects flowing from a single case across legal, social and economic domains, the evidence supporting each, and the strength of the inferred causal link.
Aggregate Case Impact Charts (ACIC)
At cluster level, the ACIC synthesises ICIC entries across families of cases, with thematic and geographic cross-cluster analyses surfacing where, how and under what conditions litigation produces impact at scale.
Triangulating the full record
We examine cases through systematic cross-referencing of court proceedings, legislative records, policy documents, media coverage, corporate disclosures and stakeholder interviews — building a comprehensive evidence base that connects litigation events to observable changes across multiple domains.
A multi-source record
Court proceedings, legislative records, policy documents, media coverage, corporate disclosures and structured stakeholder interviews are read against one another to corroborate every finding.
Process-tracing
Our process-tracing methodology will reconstruct the causal mechanisms linking litigation to impacts, distinguishing genuine effects from mere correlation. We don’t just document what changed after litigation — we demonstrate how and why litigation drove those changes.
An unprecedented empirical assessment
500 cases analysed through interdisciplinary methods, generating the most comprehensive empirical assessment of climate litigation’s effectiveness ever produced.
500
Cases analysed under a common interdisciplinary framework — 327 government-target and 173 private-target.
3
Disciplinary lenses — legal, sociological and economic — applied to the same cases at once.
~20%
Approximate share of all global climate litigation represented in the Climpact sample.