Corporate Accountability and Environmental Victimhood: A New Era of Social Justice Litigation

Abstract

One of the trends of modern environmental injustice has become environmental victimhood, especially in the Global South, where industrial production, extractive development, and non-enforcement of regulations has historically impacted marginalized communities. Although it is true that courts have been specifically requested to intervene in environmental injuries caused by companies, litigation as a means of accountability has not been evenly distributed. The paper discusses environmental justice litigation through a socio-legal lens of practitioners working in India and other similar jurisdictions of the Global South to see how environmental victimhood is identified, resolved, and rectified in practice.

The paper is based on a critical examination of litigated cases on industrial pollution, extractive projects, and toxic exposure, and it follows judicial interpretations of tort principles, constitutional rights, litigation in the public interest, scientific evidence, and new transnational liability principles. Through a media-to-docket triangulation approach, it separates socially recorded harm and legally enforceable accountability and shows recurring failures in delivering victim-focused remedies in the relationship between judicial acceptance of environmental harm and the provision of legal outcomes. Based on the analysis, it is clear that the expansion of the liability doctrine and the increased normative recognition of environmental harm by the court is still fragmented, delayed, and, most crucially, marked by weak administrative follow-through in enforcement.

The paper has presented a comparative case study and conceptual models of corporate accountability to argue that the main problem of the environmental justice litigation in India is not the lack of legal doctrine, but the lack of translation between the environmental harm, corporate responsibility, and remedial consequences. Environmental litigation can therefore be considered as a required yet structurally constrained instrument, one with the power to expose corporate bad practices and the ability to express rights, but which lack the capacity to provide timely, enforceable and remedial justice to victims of environmental harm.