Search Results

An examination is made of the emergence and institutionalization of a new policy domain for the European Community (EC): environmental protection – a domain that did not exist before the signing of the Single European Act (SEA) of 1985, when the Member States formally recognized the EC's legislative authority in the field, and the strengthening of these competences in 1992 by the Treaty of European Union and in 1997 by the Treaty of Amsterdam. Partly owing to lack of Treaty basis, and partly because of factors to be discussed in this chapter, the influence of the legal system on the development of the EC's policy has not been as pervasive as it has been for the main categories of law and policy established under the original Rome Treaty. The first section, ‘The Policy Domain’ provides a brief overview of the evolution of environmental protection as a supranational field of governance. The second focuses on the attempts of the European Court of Justice (ECJ) to manage the relationship between freedom of trade (free movement of goods) and the EC's environmental policies, showing that this case law served to legitimize the EC's competences in the field before the SEA. The third section assesses the Court's interactions with the EC legislator and the Member States from the perspective of delegation theory, examining both what happens when the ECJ acts as a trustee of the Treaty, and when it functions as an agent of the legislator, i.e. when it is asked to resolve disputes about the meaning of provisions contained in EC statutes; no evidence was found that the ECJ regularly defers to the interests of powerful Member States, rather, it has pursued the ‘Community's interest’, broadly conceived, even when engaging in routine statutory interpretation.

This essay traces the history of market mechanisms and describes their theoretical advantages over prescriptive regulation. It gives an overview of the lessons learned about market instruments thus far, among them that there is an ongoing need for both flexibility and simplicity and for more effective monitoring and enforcement. It argues that there remain important limitations to the success of market instruments, including that firms are not yet well equipped to fully utilize them. The chapter concludes with predictions about the conditions under which such instruments are most likely to succeed.

Sets out the general background and rationale for the central claim of this book, namely, that a right of every individual to an environment adequate for their health and well-being should receive express provision in the constitution of any modern democratic state. Introduces the six general lines of criticism in the order in which they will be addressed in the remaining chapters.

Addresses the doubt about whether, even if legitimately enforceable, a constitutional right to an adequate environment is necessary. The European Union (EU) is taken as a context in which that doubt would seem particularly strongly motivated. For the range of existing environmental and human rights provisions which are binding on member states of the EU might already provide the protections that a formally declared right to an adequate environment would aim for. Shows that while those provisions offer significant protections, these nonetheless fall short of what a substantive environmental right with constitutional force would aim to achieve, and so the latter would not be nugatory.

This chapter examines the campaigns for constitutional rights to environmental protection. In the 1960s and 1970s, when Congress was passing landmark environmental regulations and an entire executive agency had been developed to address the subject, environmental activists continued to lobby for the insertion of positive rights to environmental protection into their state constitutions. As a result, state constitutions came to include broad rights to environmental health and protection. The chapter first provides an overview of environmental activism during the 1960s and 1970s before explaining why environmental activists targeted state constitutions despite so much environmental action at the national level. It argues that environmentalists did not choose to pursue constitutional rights to environmental protection only at the federal level. Instead, states' constitutional conventions, environmental organizations, and even legislatures continued to alter state constitutions by adding mandates for protective and interventionist government.

This introductory chapter begins with a brief discussion of the human role in changing the Earth's environment. It then reviews awareness and responses to environmental change from the 1700s to the 1950s. The dramatic increase in action towards helping the environment from the 1960s onwards, developments in environmental science, and the goal of sustainability are discussed.

An exploration is made of how the environmental justice movement in the United States has taken on some of the communicative and participatory demands and practices of critical pluralism. The movement has been critical of the communicative methods of the mainstream – the top-down organizational structure and its one-way nature of communication, and the lack of attention to issues of public participation in policy-making – and issues of communication have been a central focus in the development and demands of environmental justice. Accepting the diversity and the situated experiences of individuals and cultures has fostered the use of, and demand for, a variety of innovative communicative processes. Internally, the movement has attempted to employ more open discursive processes, paying particular attention to communication within and across diverse groups. Externally, the movement has made demands with regard to issues of communication and more discursive and participatory policy-making on government agencies, particularly the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA).

Here Michael Jacobs notes that sustainable development has come to mean all things to all people but argues this does not mean it has no theoretical or policy relevance. It is a ‘contested’ rather than an empty concept, and Jacobs identifies four ‘faultlines’ that produce two distinct conceptions of sustainable development which he calls ‘radical’ and ‘conservative’. The faultlines are: limits to growth, environmental protection, equity, and participation. Jacobs argues in favour of the radical conception.

This chapter looks into society-related variables, or, in the case of political parties, a variable that mediates between state and society. Conceivably, it is in the domestic political environments that cross-national differences are most likely to be reinforced or reduced depending on the balance of actors, interests, and pressures. A central element of these domestic political systems is the role of electoral competition on the part of political parties vying with one another for votes from mass publics. Political parties and public opinion do not as such determine policy, but they may help to shape policy strategies and preferences over the environment on which governments act. In addition to all these, the willingness of people to abide by norms and regulations for protecting the environment is obviously a significant element in the extent to which any policy strategy is feasible and successful.

Geographical approaches to human-environment relations have been diverse and dynamic over the last century. They have also been heavily influenced not only by academic disciplines outside geography but by popular and policy concerns outside academia. From an initial flurry of activity about how the environment influences society in the early part of the century, British geography then took a detour to other topics even as other disciplines discovered the environment as a topic of interest. This left geographers playing ‘catch-up’ in the late twentieth century, as the discipline sought to reoccupy the ground previously abandoned. This is not over yet: in the 1990s, research into ‘the environment’ and ‘nature’ was scattered across academia. This chapter examines the relationship between humans and the contemporary environment, focusing on environmental protection, environmental management and ecological science, environmental policy and management, environmentalism, and environment and history.

Domestic and international policy‐making on protection of the ozone layer are examined from 1980 to 1987. Tracks the 1982 resumption of international negotiations to protect the ozone layer after two further unsuccessful attempts. Follows the progression of these negotiations, and their interactions with domestic policy and corporate strategy, over five years: three years of stagnation leading to the 1985 Vienna Convention, followed by two years of rapid progress culminating in the 1987 Montreal Protocol — the first international agreement on concrete measures to reduce human contribution to ozone depletion.

This chapter discusses critically the main criticisms of the use of cost‐benefit analysis in environmental policy, such as the incommensurability of environmental values with the values born by marketable goods, and the related unreliability of estimates of peoples’ willingness to pay for environmental protection. While it is found that there is some strength in these criticisms, it is still necessary to take account of the resource constraint involved in decisions concerning public goods. Furthermore, a democratic society needs some impartial and transparent process for solving allocation problems. However, the need to reconcile the valid objections made by environmentalists to cost‐benefit analysis with the problems raised by resource constraints raises new problems of political theory and institutions.

Many of the arguments about the processes of European integration that were reviewed previously turn on the issue of spillover. In this chapter, the origins of the EU environmental policy in terms of this concept are examined, particularly, the relationship between the single market and environmental policy, on the assumption that the creation of the single market has been the most important device for increasing European integration. In addition, it shows that there is clearly a close relationship between the evolving European single market and the protection of the European environment. It also seeks to address the question of how far this relationship develops from technical spillover to political spillover.

During the last two or three decades, various developments in the environmental sphere have led to increasing concern with our obligations to posterity and to the non‐human part of the natural world. These developments have exposed gaps in both traditional, moral, and political theory and in conventional economics. Environmental issues have exposed these gaps and have brought to the fore questions such as how far the society, with whose welfare we are concerned, includes future generations or is limited to individual nations or human beings. This book examines these questions as well as related ethical aspects of environmental policy, such as environmental valuation or the equitable allocation among nations of the burden of environmental protection.

This chapter examines debt-for-nature swaps and their potential for offsetting sovereign debt. Debt-for-nature swaps originated in the 1980s as a way of preserving natural areas in the developing world while at the same time reducing the external debt of the host country. The win-win nature of this type of transaction created many potential applications, and the US Congress and other national legislatures soon passed legislation enabling billions of dollars worth of swaps to take place. However, that potential was never realized. Legislative mandates were not funded, developing countries became suspicious of swaps as they believed they posed a threat to their sovereignty, and an improvement in debt markets reduced the attractiveness of swap economics. It is argued that although swaps are not a panacea for either debt reduction or environmental protection, they offer a concrete tool to promote both ends, and tremendous potential for swaps still exists.

This chapter documents the broad trends in bilateral aid for environmental protection. Utilizing the PLAID dataset, it reports which donors are greenest and where they target their assistance (sectorally and crossnationally). Five case studies of bilateral donors are used to understand why national aid agencies sometimes appear so different in their approaches to environment and development issues. It begins with two consistently green donors: Denmark and Germany; it then examine two countries that have increased their spending on environmental aid, but still spend less than average donors in per capita terms: the UK and the US. Finally, the case of Japan — a donor that has substantially increased its environmental aid commitments over the course of a decade to rise from one of the smallest to one of the largest environmental aid donors — is analyzed.