Green lawfare: environmental public interest litigation and mediatized environmental conflict

Communication strategies involving news media and environmental groups are well documented and research into protest politics and other forms of environmental communication has made considerable progress in the analysis of the strategies that various actors use to influence environmental policy. There is less scholarship, however, on the journalistic representation of the legal strategies employed by environmental non-government organizations, such as the mediatized debates about the use of law by these groups and the laws themselves. Further, while legal scholarship observes the role of public interest litigation in environmental matters, the role of news media as an influential force in public opinion formation and mobilization in the context of environmental litigation as an activist strategy remains less understood. Using the 2015 “green lawfare” debate in Australia that followed a successful Australian Federal Court challenge to a coalmine, this paper argues that the “mediatized visibility” inherent in public interest litigation is an important, but mostly overlooked, element of mediatized environmental conflict.