Ecological Justice and Continuing Mandamus in Pakistan

“The thing the ecologically illiterate don’t realize about an ecosystem is that it’s a system. A system! A system maintains a certain fluid stability that can be destroyed by a misstep in just one niche. A system has order, a flowing from point to point. If something dams that flow, order collapses. The untrained might miss that collapse until it was too late. That’s why the highest function of ecology is the understanding of consequences.”

~ Frank Herbert

In his novel Dune, Frank Herbert tries to explain that an ecosystem isn’t a collection of parts, it’s a system, and systems don’t announce their own collapse. Damage builds quietly in one corner until, all at once, the whole structure gives way. Herbert was writing about sand and spice and a desert planet, but the logic he was describing applies just as well to institutions. A bureaucracy that ignores a groundwater table for a decade doesn’t get a warning shot. It gets a crisis.

Most recently, Justice Shahid Karim addressed, roughly, the same problem in his final judgment before retirement. He called it the last judgment in the trilogy, with the first two judgments reported in 2023 and 2025. It was a systemic response from the judiciary when the executive branch failed to perform its functions. From a single petition being filed 8 years ago, hundreds of orders stemmed out, actually changing things on the ground.

In constitutional and administrative law, this response is known as “continuing mandamus.” It treats compliance as a process rather than an event, which is exactly the right instinct for problems that are themselves processes. A standard mandamus tells an authority to do something, and the court’s job ends there.

The doctrine traces to Vineet Narain case where the Indian Supreme Court used it to supervise the CBI’s investigation into a major corruption scandal, demanding periodic reports rather than issuing one directive. The court held that,

…it is best to issue directions from time to time and keep the matter pending, requiring the agencies to report the progress of investigation so that monitoring by the Court could ensure continuance of the investigation. This act is known as Continuing Mandamus.

Environmental litigation adopted the technique soon after, for an obvious reason: environmental harm is itself systemic. A single order banning one polluting factory doesn’t fix a groundwater table. You need ongoing supervision, because the problem is a system, not an event.

In Pakistan, this jurisprudence was first developed in 2015 when Asghar Leghari, a farmer, filed a petition that the government’s failure to implement its own National Climate Change Policy violated his fundamental rights, in particular, Articles 9 and 14 of the Constitution besides the constitutional principles of social and economic justice. Justice Syed Mansoor Ali Shah agreed, and treated the petition explicitly as “a rolling review or a continuing mandamus,” comparing it to the Philippines’ writ of kalikasan, a remedy built specifically for constitutional environmental rights.

He constituted a Climate Change Commission under Order 26 of the Code of Civil Procedure: twenty-one members, a secretariat housed at the federal Ministry of Climate Change rather than the court itself. The petitioner’s own counsel sat as one of the Commission’s members overseeing compliance.

The case ran until January 2018, just over two years, and by the Commission’s own report, 66.11% of the priority items of the Framework have been completed due to the efforts made by the commission. During the same period the federal government enacted the Pakistan Climate Change Act, 2017, creating a statutory Climate Change Authority, a piece of durable legislative infrastructure that arguably owes something to the pressure the litigation generated. Subsequently, Justice Shah made an interesting ending by dissolving the Commission, but created a new Standing Committee to act as a link between the Court and the Executive. The petition is revivable by application, before any Green Bench, if and when required.

The clear definition of Continuing mandamus in a Pakistani judgment came in 2019 by Justice Jawad Hasan in the case of Asim Farooq case, a case that dealt with forest cover and tree plantation. He defined it as follows:

Continuing Mandamus is a writ of mandamus issued to an authority by the High Court under Article 199 of the Constitution in general public interest asking the officer of the authority to perform its task expeditiously for an unstipulated period of time for preventing miscarriage of justice.

In the last eight years, Justice Shahid Karim forced administrative action across multiple fronts, ranging from mandating vehicular emission standards and shutting down pyrolysis plants to enforcing strict bans on the cutting of trees for infrastructure projects. These were real, measurable results: recharge wells, tree protection regulations, a groundwater depletion rate that reportedly slowed from roughly 6.5 metres a year in 2017 to under a metre by 2025.  This rolling review process effectively dammed the flow of ecological collapse that Herbert warned about. It forced disparate government departments to coordinate and act where political will had previously faltered.

The doctrine has produced real, measurable wins, and it has done so specifically because Justice Mansoor and the judges who followed built in some discipline: technical commissions instead of judicial fiat, sunset clauses instead of indefinite supervision, and a habit of handing responsibility back to standing institutions once they’re capable of holding it. If Pakistani courts are going to keep using continuing mandamus to do the work legislatures and executives won’t, and there is every reason to think they will, the design choices made this early will set the pattern future courts inherit. Understanding that, in the end, is the highest function not just of ecology, but of judicial review that means to last.