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Bronwen Morgan

The University of New South Wales, Faculty of Law, Faculty Member

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I am a socio-legal scholar working at the intersection of law and social science, with a strong interest in new and diverse economies, mostly of the kind affiliated with solidarity and the creation of a commons. I have longstanding research interests in regulation, especially the interaction between its technocratic interstices and collective commitments to democracy and conviviality. Finally, energy, food, water and new kinds of lawyers have occupied my empirical focus of late. Join me in musing on these strands!

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Seema Purushothaman

Siddharth Tripathi

Universität Erfurt

Mònica Clua-Losada

Pompeu Fabra University

University of Bristol

Matthew Flinders

The University of Sheffield

Attracta Lafferty

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Papers by Bronwen Morgan

Addressing the global social challenges of our time

Global Social Challenges Journal

It gives us great pleasure to introduce the Global Social Challenges Journal (GSCJ). This launch ... more It gives us great pleasure to introduce the Global Social Challenges Journal (GSCJ). This launch is the culmination of a process begun over two years ago, when Bristol University Press approached individuals who had worked with them previously, to sound us out about preliminary ideas for an open-access journal on a new platform. The intervening time has been filled with building a diverse team of editors-in-chief (EiCs), associate editors (AEs) and reviewers, and with discussions and decisions about

The diverse legalities of the sharing economy (Swinburne Institute Seminar Series)

Professor Bronwen Morgan (University of New South Wales) seeks to bring into dialogue two previou... more Professor Bronwen Morgan (University of New South Wales) seeks to bring into dialogue two previously unrelated areas of scholarship: legal consciousness and diverse economies, as a way of illuminating the analysis of community-level action for sustainability, including its troubled relationship to the emerging 'sharing economy'. She draws indirectly on a comparative UK-Australia study of 'grassroots innovations' ("networks of activists and organisations generating novel bottom-up solutions for sustainable development") in food, energy and transport. These initiatives stress, to varying degrees, civil society, activism, localism and community even while tensions emerge with particular forms of the sharing economy that enact and rely on much more extractive modes of 'business-as-usual'. Presented Friday 01 May 2015

Are you being MRV’D? : seeing like a planet and the regulatory challenges of governing climate change policy in emerging economies

Workshop paper presented at the Annual Meeting of Law and Society Association, 2-5 June 2014, Bos... more Workshop paper presented at the Annual Meeting of Law and Society Association, 2-5 June 2014, Boston, USA.This conference paper addresses new forms of climate change governance and how they differ from traditional approaches. It focuses on understanding the emerging shape and content of systems of monitoring, reporting and verification (MRV systems) of progress on carbon reduction goals that are being established at both national and international levels. In essence these are bottom-up approaches that seek to avoid the risks of stalled global treaty negotiations, while continuing to build a new more inclusive North-South basis. The paper explores three regulatory challenges of the ‘bottom-up’ approach, and how MRV systems can facilitate new governance relationships

Law in context as terrestrial politics?

International Journal of Law in Context, 2020

Reading Jurist in Context (Twining, 2019, hereafter ‘JiC’) provides an absorbing and highly engag... more Reading Jurist in Context (Twining, 2019, hereafter ‘JiC’) provides an absorbing and highly engaging journey in its own right, as well as an opportunity to reflect on the field of law in context. William Twining’s book positions itself as an intellectual memoir, and more specifically a contribution to reflecting on what it means to educate for the disciplinary health of legal studies. The intellectual journey that it documents traces the intersection of place and identity. In relation to place, the reader moves biographically through Africa, the US and the UK. Identity is embodied in the hybrid figure of the jurist, who braids together multiple roles of teacher, professional, public intellectual and activist. This brief response to the book seeks to unpack that intersection of place and identity, first for the author and his hybrid braided roles, and then for the series in which the book is placed. After these two steps, which engage with the book on its own terms, I extend the reflection to a more personal engagement with how the book resonates for myself as a scholar and mild activist currently located in Oceania. More specifically, I suggest that, for William Twining the author, law in context can integrate place and identity through the figure of the jurist, in ways that help readers of his book appreciate how legal studies can thrive. Then, given the systemic challenges of law, economy and society that confront our planet at the present time, I ask what it would mean to consider the Law in Context series as a whole through the lens of governing for planetary well-being. Can the Law in Context series educate jurists across the globe to integrate place and identity in ways that connect law with planetary wellbeing? I suggest it can, especially if we read Twining’s intellectual memoir along with Bruno Latour’s call for terrestrial politics (Latour, 2018).

Transcending The Corporation

The Oxford Handbook of the Corporation, 2019

Recent developments in experiments with legal organizational forms are injecting diversity into t... more Recent developments in experiments with legal organizational forms are injecting diversity into the relative monoculture of the corporate form. Two threads are of particular interest in this chapter. The first concerns the creation of hybrid legal structures for “social enterprise.” The second stems from a revival of interest in cooperative structures, particularly in tandem with the digital economy. The chapter places these two threads in dialogue with Simon Deakin’s recent stimulating argument that the commons provides the most convincing conceptual foundation for understanding corporate governance. The chapter concludes with a brief overview of governance experimentation in small-scale food enterprises. Since debates around the production and distribution of food increasingly center around the notion of food as a “commons,” this provides a useful illustration of some of the key implications of the chapter’s argument.

Sustainable Justice: Reconciling International Economic, Environmental and Social Law

The hopeful edges of power: Radical governance and acting 'as if

There's a playful power in interventions that assume the world is as it could be, not as it i... more

Corporate Governance for Sustainability

SSRN Electronic Journal, 2019

The Intersection of Rights and Regulation

The Intersection of Rights and Regulation, 2017

An Introduction to Law and Regulation: Introduction

From Statements of Intent to Institutionalised Practice: What Makes Climate Change Policies Stick?

SSRN Electronic Journal, 2014

The growing literature on multi-level governance of climate change has emphasised horizontal netw... more The growing literature on multi-level governance of climate change has emphasised horizontal networks and a broad range of actors shaping mitigation policies and outcomes. In seeking to come to terms with the novel networked configurations of actors engaged in climate change governance, this literature loses its focus on the role of formal institutions in enabling and inhibiting major shifts in policy and practice. The emerging literature on "bottom up" climate policy draws out key political and institutional variables that influence the adoption of climate change policies but take institutionalisation as a given. This paper responds to this neglect of institutions, which is particularly marked in developing countries, by enquiring into the factors that take mitigation policies from statements of intent to embedded institutional practices. The paper draws on institutional theory to argue that there are degrees of institutionalisation and to identify the factors that enable or inhibit the intensification of institutionalisation of mitigation policies. Using an inductive approach that involved qualitative interviews with key policy actors in South Africa, the paper finds that deliberative decisionmaking and discursive construction, constraints on cross-jurisdictional scope, and inter-scalar problem construction play a key role in shaping the process of institutionalisation.

What is Right with Ideology?

Oxford Journal of Legal Studies, 2002

The spectator's judgement is sure to miss the root of the matter. .. The subject judged knows a p... more The spectator's judgement is sure to miss the root of the matter. .. The subject judged knows a part of the world of reality which the judging spectator fails to see. .. ; and, wherever there is conflict of opinion and difference of vision, we are bound to believe that the truer side is the side that feels the more, and not the side that feels the less. 1 † A review of William Lucy's Understanding and Explaining Adjudication (Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1999). The title is a riposte to Lucy's review of Duncan Kennedy in volume 20 of this journal, entitled 'What is Wrong with Ideology?'. All page references in the text are to pages in this book.

Oh, Reason Not the Need: Rights and Other Imperfect Alternatives for those without Voice

Law <html_ent glyph="@amp;" ascii="&"/> Social Inquiry, 1999

Review: Matthew Hilton, Prosperity for All: Consumer Activism in an Era of Globalization, Ithaca, NY, Cornell University Press, 2009; ix + 307 pp.; $26.95 pbk; ISBN 9780801475078

Journal of Contemporary History, 2011

limitations of transnationalism and globalization for al-Qaeda and its like. As Osama bin Laden’s... more limitations of transnationalism and globalization for al-Qaeda and its like. As Osama bin Laden’s global jihad has been imported into local contexts in the service of local, and often sectarian, ends, so the victims of al-Qaeda-related violence have been largely Muslim and civilian. The bloody reality on the ground in Iraq and Pakistan, for example, completely undercuts the lynchpin of both al-Qaeda’s strategic narrative and its casus belli: that it only employs violence in defence of Muslims in the face of Zionist–Crusader aggression. Thus, ironically, the availability of a territorial base may prove crucial for bin Laden’s ability to reassert authority over the global jihad and thus for the survival of al-Qaeda in the twenty-first century. In short, the nuances and contradictions of the terrorist’s relationship with globalization are left unattended by this volume. Hobsbawm’s analysis is weakened by the dispersal of his larger points across different chapters, which, moreover, makes for repetitious reading. The lack of structure is, however, mitigated by the liveliness of the commentary, which invokes the football World Cup to illustrate ‘the dialectics of the relations between globalisation, national identity and xenophobia’ (89) and connects rising public disorder to increasing usage of the f-word in public (142). The book certainly puts into eloquent phrases and historical context the instincts of those scores of people who recoil at the USA’s global agenda. But, as Bush administration officials are derided as ‘crazies’ (47) and the war on terror is referred to as ‘rubbish’ (151), those readers less cynical about US hegemony may dismiss the work as an exercise in polemics.

The North–South politics of necessity: regulating for basic rights between national and international levels

Journal of Consumer Policy, 2007

The paper explores three key initiatives at the international level in relation to access to wate... more The paper explores three key initiatives at the international level in relation to access to water that demonstrate a convergence between consumerism, markets and a right of access to basic goods and essential services. It argues that these initiatives are an instance of a regulatory politics that is increasingly the common coin of debates about providing basic necessities in the context of a strong policy preference for market-based systems of provision. The paper begins with an overview of some key contemporary policy issues relating to access to water, followed by a conceptual analysis of how these issues link regulation, markets and rights. The second half of the paper draws an empirical map of current developments in the area, focusing in particular on the political implications-both explicit and implicit-of the global politics of necessity for relationships between developed and developing countries. Keywords Regulation AE Rights AE Water AE Essential services AE Global governance Transnational provision of urban water service delivery The provision of urban water services is an essential service that provides a basic good critical to life. Urban water services also tend to be capital-intensive natural monopolies. For these reasons, urban water has at least since industrialization tended to be an object of state provision. As Christopher Hamlin argues in the opening paper of this volume, since Edwin Chadwick's 1842 Report on the Sanitary Condition of the Labouring Population, ''water, drainage and wastes removal were accepted as necessary to urban existence and as obviously and essentially public responsibilities'' (Hamlin, 2006, p. XX). Today some 90%-95% of water service provision still remains in public hands, and the planning, administration, and regulation of the

Introduction: the politics of necessity

Journal of Consumer Policy, 2007

In the last century, theories and histories of consumption developed grounded in desire rather th... more

E-commerce law: national and transnational topics and perspectives

... This requires the e-trader's home State to enforce defined standards of good conduct rel... more

Dissonant Justifications: an organisational perspective of support for Australian community energy

People Place and Policy Online, Dec 18, 2015

This paper presents a narrative ethnography of a Sydney-based community energy venture called Pin... more This paper presents a narrative ethnography of a Sydney-based community energy venture called Pingala, drawing on participant observation and action research carried out over an 18-month period from April 2013. The narrative presents a socially embedded account of a) the intersection of biography and expertise in the practices of community energy 'entrepreneurs', and b) the process of negotiating community energy support infrastructure. The organisational perspective of Pingala provides the primary focus for justifications of community energy's worth that must navigate interpersonal and macro-level policy concerns. This sociology of justification perspective shows how incommensurable evaluations of worth justify different forms of support for community energy enterprises such as Pingala. The paper concludes with some remarks on these forms, relating Pingala's experience negotiating support infrastructure to lessons for Australia's nascent community energy sector.

The Socio-Legal Implications of the New Politics of Climate Change

As 2016 lengthened its stride, the ‘ambivalent euphoria’ of the 2015 Paris Agreement on climate c... more As 2016 lengthened its stride, the ‘ambivalent euphoria’ of the 2015 Paris Agreement on climate change gave way to a sense of ‘where to from here?’ As one of us commented at the time, ‘[w]hile the technicalities of the Kyoto Protocol were never easy fodder for inspiring collective action, the [post-Paris] terrain is arguably even more forbidding on that score’. Each country will submit Nationally Determined Contributions, a welter of sector-specific plans and measures which will be assessed, monitored, analysed and reviewed by carbon management professionals via procedures still being fought over. This is, from the perspective of global climate treaty processes, a ‘bottom-up’ approach to responding to climate change.From the perspective of the citizens of diverse countries, however, most of these measures will still emerge as embedded in, enabled by and shaped by government policies such as carbon pricing regulations – after all, the ‘bottom-up’ nature of this approach can only be u...

Radical Transactionalism: Legal Consciousness, Diverse Economies, and the Sharing Economy

Journal of Law and Society, 2015

This paper proposes an original theoretical approach to the analysis of community-level action fo... more This paper proposes an original theoretical approach to the analysis of community-level action for sustainability, focusing on its troubled relationship to the sharing economy. It shows, through a conversation between scholarship on legal consciousness and diverse economies, how struggles over transactional legality are a neglected site of activism for sustainability. Recognising the diversity of economic life and forms of law illuminates what we call 'radical transactionalism': the creative redeployment of legal techniques and practices relating to risk management, organisational form and the allocation of contractual and property rights in order to further the purpose of internalising social and ecological values into the heart of economic exchange. By viewing sharing economy initiatives 'beyond AirBnB and Uber' as sites of radical transactionalism, legal building blocks of property and capital can be reimagined and reconfigured, helping to construct a shared infrastructure for the exercise of collective agency in response to disadvantage sustained by law.

Addressing the global social challenges of our time

Global Social Challenges Journal

It gives us great pleasure to introduce the Global Social Challenges Journal (GSCJ). This launch ... more It gives us great pleasure to introduce the Global Social Challenges Journal (GSCJ). This launch is the culmination of a process begun over two years ago, when Bristol University Press approached individuals who had worked with them previously, to sound us out about preliminary ideas for an open-access journal on a new platform. The intervening time has been filled with building a diverse team of editors-in-chief (EiCs), associate editors (AEs) and reviewers, and with discussions and decisions about

The diverse legalities of the sharing economy (Swinburne Institute Seminar Series)

Professor Bronwen Morgan (University of New South Wales) seeks to bring into dialogue two previou... more Professor Bronwen Morgan (University of New South Wales) seeks to bring into dialogue two previously unrelated areas of scholarship: legal consciousness and diverse economies, as a way of illuminating the analysis of community-level action for sustainability, including its troubled relationship to the emerging 'sharing economy'. She draws indirectly on a comparative UK-Australia study of 'grassroots innovations' ("networks of activists and organisations generating novel bottom-up solutions for sustainable development") in food, energy and transport. These initiatives stress, to varying degrees, civil society, activism, localism and community even while tensions emerge with particular forms of the sharing economy that enact and rely on much more extractive modes of 'business-as-usual'. Presented Friday 01 May 2015

Are you being MRV’D? : seeing like a planet and the regulatory challenges of governing climate change policy in emerging economies

Workshop paper presented at the Annual Meeting of Law and Society Association, 2-5 June 2014, Bos... more Workshop paper presented at the Annual Meeting of Law and Society Association, 2-5 June 2014, Boston, USA.This conference paper addresses new forms of climate change governance and how they differ from traditional approaches. It focuses on understanding the emerging shape and content of systems of monitoring, reporting and verification (MRV systems) of progress on carbon reduction goals that are being established at both national and international levels. In essence these are bottom-up approaches that seek to avoid the risks of stalled global treaty negotiations, while continuing to build a new more inclusive North-South basis. The paper explores three regulatory challenges of the ‘bottom-up’ approach, and how MRV systems can facilitate new governance relationships

Law in context as terrestrial politics?

International Journal of Law in Context, 2020

Reading Jurist in Context (Twining, 2019, hereafter ‘JiC’) provides an absorbing and highly engag... more Reading Jurist in Context (Twining, 2019, hereafter ‘JiC’) provides an absorbing and highly engaging journey in its own right, as well as an opportunity to reflect on the field of law in context. William Twining’s book positions itself as an intellectual memoir, and more specifically a contribution to reflecting on what it means to educate for the disciplinary health of legal studies. The intellectual journey that it documents traces the intersection of place and identity. In relation to place, the reader moves biographically through Africa, the US and the UK. Identity is embodied in the hybrid figure of the jurist, who braids together multiple roles of teacher, professional, public intellectual and activist. This brief response to the book seeks to unpack that intersection of place and identity, first for the author and his hybrid braided roles, and then for the series in which the book is placed. After these two steps, which engage with the book on its own terms, I extend the reflection to a more personal engagement with how the book resonates for myself as a scholar and mild activist currently located in Oceania. More specifically, I suggest that, for William Twining the author, law in context can integrate place and identity through the figure of the jurist, in ways that help readers of his book appreciate how legal studies can thrive. Then, given the systemic challenges of law, economy and society that confront our planet at the present time, I ask what it would mean to consider the Law in Context series as a whole through the lens of governing for planetary well-being. Can the Law in Context series educate jurists across the globe to integrate place and identity in ways that connect law with planetary wellbeing? I suggest it can, especially if we read Twining’s intellectual memoir along with Bruno Latour’s call for terrestrial politics (Latour, 2018).

Transcending The Corporation

The Oxford Handbook of the Corporation, 2019

Recent developments in experiments with legal organizational forms are injecting diversity into t... more Recent developments in experiments with legal organizational forms are injecting diversity into the relative monoculture of the corporate form. Two threads are of particular interest in this chapter. The first concerns the creation of hybrid legal structures for “social enterprise.” The second stems from a revival of interest in cooperative structures, particularly in tandem with the digital economy. The chapter places these two threads in dialogue with Simon Deakin’s recent stimulating argument that the commons provides the most convincing conceptual foundation for understanding corporate governance. The chapter concludes with a brief overview of governance experimentation in small-scale food enterprises. Since debates around the production and distribution of food increasingly center around the notion of food as a “commons,” this provides a useful illustration of some of the key implications of the chapter’s argument.

Sustainable Justice: Reconciling International Economic, Environmental and Social Law

The hopeful edges of power: Radical governance and acting 'as if

There's a playful power in interventions that assume the world is as it could be, not as it i... more

Corporate Governance for Sustainability

SSRN Electronic Journal, 2019

The Intersection of Rights and Regulation

The Intersection of Rights and Regulation, 2017

An Introduction to Law and Regulation: Introduction

From Statements of Intent to Institutionalised Practice: What Makes Climate Change Policies Stick?

SSRN Electronic Journal, 2014

The growing literature on multi-level governance of climate change has emphasised horizontal netw... more The growing literature on multi-level governance of climate change has emphasised horizontal networks and a broad range of actors shaping mitigation policies and outcomes. In seeking to come to terms with the novel networked configurations of actors engaged in climate change governance, this literature loses its focus on the role of formal institutions in enabling and inhibiting major shifts in policy and practice. The emerging literature on "bottom up" climate policy draws out key political and institutional variables that influence the adoption of climate change policies but take institutionalisation as a given. This paper responds to this neglect of institutions, which is particularly marked in developing countries, by enquiring into the factors that take mitigation policies from statements of intent to embedded institutional practices. The paper draws on institutional theory to argue that there are degrees of institutionalisation and to identify the factors that enable or inhibit the intensification of institutionalisation of mitigation policies. Using an inductive approach that involved qualitative interviews with key policy actors in South Africa, the paper finds that deliberative decisionmaking and discursive construction, constraints on cross-jurisdictional scope, and inter-scalar problem construction play a key role in shaping the process of institutionalisation.

What is Right with Ideology?

Oxford Journal of Legal Studies, 2002

The spectator's judgement is sure to miss the root of the matter. .. The subject judged knows a p... more The spectator's judgement is sure to miss the root of the matter. .. The subject judged knows a part of the world of reality which the judging spectator fails to see. .. ; and, wherever there is conflict of opinion and difference of vision, we are bound to believe that the truer side is the side that feels the more, and not the side that feels the less. 1 † A review of William Lucy's Understanding and Explaining Adjudication (Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1999). The title is a riposte to Lucy's review of Duncan Kennedy in volume 20 of this journal, entitled 'What is Wrong with Ideology?'. All page references in the text are to pages in this book.

Oh, Reason Not the Need: Rights and Other Imperfect Alternatives for those without Voice

Law <html_ent glyph="@amp;" ascii="&"/> Social Inquiry, 1999

Review: Matthew Hilton, Prosperity for All: Consumer Activism in an Era of Globalization, Ithaca, NY, Cornell University Press, 2009; ix + 307 pp.; $26.95 pbk; ISBN 9780801475078

Journal of Contemporary History, 2011

limitations of transnationalism and globalization for al-Qaeda and its like. As Osama bin Laden’s... more limitations of transnationalism and globalization for al-Qaeda and its like. As Osama bin Laden’s global jihad has been imported into local contexts in the service of local, and often sectarian, ends, so the victims of al-Qaeda-related violence have been largely Muslim and civilian. The bloody reality on the ground in Iraq and Pakistan, for example, completely undercuts the lynchpin of both al-Qaeda’s strategic narrative and its casus belli: that it only employs violence in defence of Muslims in the face of Zionist–Crusader aggression. Thus, ironically, the availability of a territorial base may prove crucial for bin Laden’s ability to reassert authority over the global jihad and thus for the survival of al-Qaeda in the twenty-first century. In short, the nuances and contradictions of the terrorist’s relationship with globalization are left unattended by this volume. Hobsbawm’s analysis is weakened by the dispersal of his larger points across different chapters, which, moreover, makes for repetitious reading. The lack of structure is, however, mitigated by the liveliness of the commentary, which invokes the football World Cup to illustrate ‘the dialectics of the relations between globalisation, national identity and xenophobia’ (89) and connects rising public disorder to increasing usage of the f-word in public (142). The book certainly puts into eloquent phrases and historical context the instincts of those scores of people who recoil at the USA’s global agenda. But, as Bush administration officials are derided as ‘crazies’ (47) and the war on terror is referred to as ‘rubbish’ (151), those readers less cynical about US hegemony may dismiss the work as an exercise in polemics.

The North–South politics of necessity: regulating for basic rights between national and international levels

Journal of Consumer Policy, 2007

The paper explores three key initiatives at the international level in relation to access to wate... more The paper explores three key initiatives at the international level in relation to access to water that demonstrate a convergence between consumerism, markets and a right of access to basic goods and essential services. It argues that these initiatives are an instance of a regulatory politics that is increasingly the common coin of debates about providing basic necessities in the context of a strong policy preference for market-based systems of provision. The paper begins with an overview of some key contemporary policy issues relating to access to water, followed by a conceptual analysis of how these issues link regulation, markets and rights. The second half of the paper draws an empirical map of current developments in the area, focusing in particular on the political implications-both explicit and implicit-of the global politics of necessity for relationships between developed and developing countries. Keywords Regulation AE Rights AE Water AE Essential services AE Global governance Transnational provision of urban water service delivery The provision of urban water services is an essential service that provides a basic good critical to life. Urban water services also tend to be capital-intensive natural monopolies. For these reasons, urban water has at least since industrialization tended to be an object of state provision. As Christopher Hamlin argues in the opening paper of this volume, since Edwin Chadwick's 1842 Report on the Sanitary Condition of the Labouring Population, ''water, drainage and wastes removal were accepted as necessary to urban existence and as obviously and essentially public responsibilities'' (Hamlin, 2006, p. XX). Today some 90%-95% of water service provision still remains in public hands, and the planning, administration, and regulation of the

Introduction: the politics of necessity

Journal of Consumer Policy, 2007

In the last century, theories and histories of consumption developed grounded in desire rather th... more

E-commerce law: national and transnational topics and perspectives

... This requires the e-trader's home State to enforce defined standards of good conduct rel... more

Dissonant Justifications: an organisational perspective of support for Australian community energy

People Place and Policy Online, Dec 18, 2015

This paper presents a narrative ethnography of a Sydney-based community energy venture called Pin... more This paper presents a narrative ethnography of a Sydney-based community energy venture called Pingala, drawing on participant observation and action research carried out over an 18-month period from April 2013. The narrative presents a socially embedded account of a) the intersection of biography and expertise in the practices of community energy 'entrepreneurs', and b) the process of negotiating community energy support infrastructure. The organisational perspective of Pingala provides the primary focus for justifications of community energy's worth that must navigate interpersonal and macro-level policy concerns. This sociology of justification perspective shows how incommensurable evaluations of worth justify different forms of support for community energy enterprises such as Pingala. The paper concludes with some remarks on these forms, relating Pingala's experience negotiating support infrastructure to lessons for Australia's nascent community energy sector.

The Socio-Legal Implications of the New Politics of Climate Change

As 2016 lengthened its stride, the ‘ambivalent euphoria’ of the 2015 Paris Agreement on climate c... more As 2016 lengthened its stride, the ‘ambivalent euphoria’ of the 2015 Paris Agreement on climate change gave way to a sense of ‘where to from here?’ As one of us commented at the time, ‘[w]hile the technicalities of the Kyoto Protocol were never easy fodder for inspiring collective action, the [post-Paris] terrain is arguably even more forbidding on that score’. Each country will submit Nationally Determined Contributions, a welter of sector-specific plans and measures which will be assessed, monitored, analysed and reviewed by carbon management professionals via procedures still being fought over. This is, from the perspective of global climate treaty processes, a ‘bottom-up’ approach to responding to climate change.From the perspective of the citizens of diverse countries, however, most of these measures will still emerge as embedded in, enabled by and shaped by government policies such as carbon pricing regulations – after all, the ‘bottom-up’ nature of this approach can only be u...

Radical Transactionalism: Legal Consciousness, Diverse Economies, and the Sharing Economy

Journal of Law and Society, 2015

This paper proposes an original theoretical approach to the analysis of community-level action fo... more This paper proposes an original theoretical approach to the analysis of community-level action for sustainability, focusing on its troubled relationship to the sharing economy. It shows, through a conversation between scholarship on legal consciousness and diverse economies, how struggles over transactional legality are a neglected site of activism for sustainability. Recognising the diversity of economic life and forms of law illuminates what we call 'radical transactionalism': the creative redeployment of legal techniques and practices relating to risk management, organisational form and the allocation of contractual and property rights in order to further the purpose of internalising social and ecological values into the heart of economic exchange. By viewing sharing economy initiatives 'beyond AirBnB and Uber' as sites of radical transactionalism, legal building blocks of property and capital can be reimagined and reconfigured, helping to construct a shared infrastructure for the exercise of collective agency in response to disadvantage sustained by law.