Prefiguring legal alternatives in environmental and climate justice struggles in Australia

This article examines attempts by environmental advocates to engage with the law’s failure to adequately respond to climate change by using alternative legal framings or venues to ‘imagine law otherwise’ and to foster legal ontological shifts. It examines these actions – including the Martuwarra Fitzroy River Council’s Fitzroy River Declaration and treaty making projects, and a recent successful UN Human Rights Committee communication brought by a community in the Torres Strait against Australia – using the lens of prefigurative theory and considers what these examples tell us about the boundaries of the concept of ‘prefigurative legality’. The legal ontological work performed by these actions is necessitated in part by their decolonial ambitions, including the promotion of legal pluralism. This raises issues that require further consideration, including what prefigurative theory can learn from Indigenous-led environmental activism that responds prefiguratively to (settler-colonial) law, how well prefigurative legal action supports legal ontological work, and whether prefiguration has a role to play in supporting actors to navigate the risks of ‘ontological submission’.