Even if sovereign immunities fail to prevent holdout litigation before a domestic court, bondholder claims may still be effectively forestalled by the operation of collective action clauses. The limits of first-generation CACs have been partially overcome, and their use in sovereign bonds is now common in the United States and is mandatory in the Eurozone. This strengthened protection for debtor sovereigns is accompanied by the introduction of accountability mechanisms that guarantee fairness in the implementation of debt workout processes. This study has concluded that the development of CACs embodies a possible balance between bondholder protection and respect for debt restructuring by sovereigns. Although a more delicate question arises when a defaulting sovereign introduces a CAC mechanism by modifying the relevant domestic law governing sovereign debt instruments, such a measure may fall within the margin of discretion exercised by the debtor sovereign as the governance organ primarily responsible for addressing its sovereign default, provided that its accountability is duly discharged in and out of courts or tribunals.

The pari passu clause in modern sovereign debt instruments may be interpreted and implemented in a manner that it constitutes part of the regulatory framework of sovereign debt restructuring. A careful reading of the NML saga revealed that US courts did not necessarily endorse the so-called ratable payment interpretation in rejecting the legal ranking interpretation; the US courts introduced ratable payment as a matter of injunctive relief for the violation of the pari passu clauses by Argentina and did not provide it as a proper interpretation of the clauses. Alternatively, this study has endorsed a third interpretation of the pari passu clauses according to which these clauses provide additional but limited protection from unfair discrimination among bondholders by the debtor sovereign in the process of debt restructuring. This interpretation may represent an appropriate balance between bondholder protection and respect for debt restructuring. In addition, the ratable payment as injunctive relief can be conceived as a regulatory implementation of pari passu clauses addressing a particular serious category of the breach of sovereign bond contracts.

This concluding chapter summarises and synthesises the book's main arguments on four levels: in relation to its five ‘divided environments’; with regard to what these cases, and the similarities and differences between them, suggest about the relations between water and (in)security; with reference to the broader significance of the analysis for understanding ecological politics and the study thereof; and on what, by extension, all this might tell us about the likely future conflict and security implications of climate change. Neither the eco-determinist nor liberal traditions, the book as a whole shows, are adequate to understanding water security and insecurity today, or to grasping the wide-ranging conflict and security implications of climate change; political ecology–informed premises are required instead. But what does this tell us about the coming landscape of climate change and conflict? The book closes by offering a series of tentative predictions.

The claim that there exists a complex ‘nexus’ linking water and other global challenges has become a commonplace of discourse on resource governance. But how should the relations between water and cognate areas be understood? This final main chapter of the book takes up this question by examining the four main relations underpinning water security and insecurity today: with trade, agricultural production, energy and capital. The chapter considers these four relations in turn, in each case providing an overall mapping of the 'transformations and circulations' that define them and an assessment of how they shape water-related (in)securities, especially in the book's five divided environments. The chapter argues that water is much more a dependent than an independent variable in nexus relations and that patterns of water (in)security are determined neither by natural availability nor market efficiencies, but instead by countries’ positionings within a structurally unequal and hierarchical capitalist world order. Against neo-liberal arguments, the chapter thus argues that contemporary capitalist nexus relations are a central part of the problem of water – and climate – security.

The fourth chapter deals with the ECJ’s present role in the EU’s political system and how its procedural and organisational law might need to be adapted to better reflect it. The chapter first explains how in recent years, notably through the Treaty of Lisbon, the ECJ’s mandate has been modified. It argues that the Court is no longer only concerned with ensuring the autonomy and effectiveness of EU law, but that it is also a democratic organ of the EU polity, whose decisions need to be responsive to EU citizens. To ensure democratic responsiveness, the chapter argues, the ECJ’s procedural and organisational law needs to be further developed. The chapter makes concrete proposals by applying the Treaty on European Union’s democratic principles to the ECJ’s procedural and organisational law. It discusses, among other things, the role of the European Parliament in selecting ECJ members the place of NGOs and civil society in ECJ proceedings, the interaction between the Advocate General and the judges, the composition of the ECJ’s chambers and the mechanism for case assignment and make suggestions how to better reflect the concern for the ECJ’s democratic responsiveness.

This full-length chapter introduces the book’s central themes and approach to analysing them. It starts by summarising the current public and policy ‘common sense’ on climate security, and by showing that the evidence base for this orthodoxy is weak or, at best, contested: this establishes the book’s primary research puzzle. With this set out, the remainder of the chapter details the book’s approach to exploring this crucial but contested issue. It does this first with regard to epistemology and method – critiquing extant environment-centric, quantitative and discourse-centric approaches, and via that articulating an alternative ‘international political ecology’ framework for the analysis of environment–security relations. It does it, second, in substantive terms, explaining the book’s focus on water as a key variable in, and analogue for understanding, climate–security linkages. And it does it, third, with regard to cases, introducing the book’s empirical focus on the five ‘divided environments’ of Cyprus, Israel–Palestine, Sudan–South Sudan, Syria and the Lake Chad basin. The chapter concludes by briefly explaining how the remainder of the book is organised.

This chapter serves as a companion to the previous one, focusing on the second main plank of eco-determinist climate and water security reasoning: drought. The chapter argues that the evidence on drought and conflict is weak and misleading; that today droughts have far more limited economic and political consequences than is usually imagined; and that we should not expect accelerating global climate change to fundamentally alter this. These arguments are developed via analysis of the first supposed ‘climate wars’ – the Darfur war of 2003–5, the ongoing Syrian civil war and the ongoing Lake Chad basin crisis – as well as consideration of the history of drought impacts and climate change projections. On each of these counts the chapter shows that the evidence, and thus the grounds for concluding that climate change–induced droughts will trigger ever-more conflict in future, is remarkably thin. Picking up on the previous chapter, the chapter also explores the politics of drought–conflict discourse, showing that ‘drought’ is often an exercise in deflecting state responsibility and obscuring political agency which does little for the security of the rural poor.

The third chapter describes how the the re-definition of the ECJ’s role from the 1960s onwards has affected its procedural and organisational law. It is well known that through decisions such as Van Gend en Loos and Costa v ENEL, the ECJ contributed to changing its mandate: from protecting the interests of the Member States to aiming to establish EU law as an autonomous and effective legal system. This chapter tells the story of how the Court’s procedure, organisation and decision-making was adpated to effectively exercise this new role. The chapter shows in detail the vast transformation the Court’s organisation and decision-making has undergone. It explains how the role of the ECJ judge was developed from state representative to neutral expert, how an inner circle of ECJ participants gradually formed that plays a central role for the acceptance and dissemination of the Court’s case law and which procedural mechanisms were devised to make ECJ decision-making more hierarchical in order to foster and maintain consistency in the Court’s case law.

In this book, I have argued that the ECJ’s procedural and organisational law has for a long time ideally fit the Court’s role in the EU’s political system but that this is no longer the case. The ECJ’s mandate has developed, and the Court’s model of decision-making should follow suit. The normative framework to develop this argument has been built on the works of three legal and political theorists: Christoph Möllers, Niklas Luhmann and Jürgen Habermas. While Möllers has helped to understand the ECJ’s original design, Luhmann’s and Habermas’ contrasting visions on the role of courts have allowed to conceptualise the main tension underlying the current ECJ procedural and organisational law. Luhmann speaks the technical language of administration and organisation. Life is complex. Things need to work. To reduce uncertainty and foster stability is what the legal system and courts are for. Jürgen Habermas offers a different perspective. He seeks to open the cold world of legal rules to a public and equal discourse on what is right and just. Justice is for Habermas much more than courts deciding like cases alike. Courts need to aim making decisions that everyone affected can potentially agree to.