Draft paper for The Law and Economics of Environmental Policy: A Symposium, Faculty of Laws, University College London, Septem (original) (raw)

Constitutional Directions in Procedural Environmental Rights

2013

Nearly three-quarters of the nations on the planet have chosen to adopt constitutions with environmental provisions that aim to advance an end. These provisions take various forms. Some confer a substantive right to a quality environment or impose a duty to protect it. Some impose duties on governmental decisions affecting the environment, such as sustainability or the public trust. Still others address specific concerns, such as water rights or climate change. The constitutions of some countries reflect several varieties of these provisions. Some constitutional provisions, however, focus more on the means of making decisions in environmental matters than on the ends to be achieved. Over the last two decades, nearly three-dozen countries have chosen to have their constitutions embed procedural rights in environmental matters. This article concludes that these provisions have untapped potential for advancing environmental protection worldwide.

Constitutional Protection for Environmental Rights: The Benefits of Environmental Process

International Journal of Peace Studies, 2012

More and more constitutions around the world-from Bangladesh to Bolivia, and from the Philippines to the countries of the EU-are explicitly protecting environmental rights and the values of a clean and healthy environment. In many instances, environmental rights are recognized not as substantive entitlements (which would allow litigants to sue if the government polluted their rivers or clearcut their forests), but as procedural rights. Examples of procedural rights include imposing on governments the obligation to consult with communities before they take actions that will affect their environment or giving individuals the right to participate in governmental processes that will affect their environment. While procedural rights do not guarantee a particular outcome, they may be more effective in preventing environmental degradation. This paper assesses the efficacy of these procedural constitutional environmental protections and seeks to determine whether procedural rights can be more efficacious than substantive environmental rights.

Introduction to Environmental Constitutionalism

2017

Environmental constitutionalism examines the development, implementation and effectiveness of incorporating environmental rights, procedures, and policies into constitutions around the globe. Through alchemy of international engagement, constitutional reform, legislative implementation, and jurisprudential vindication – informed by legal scholars and civil society change agents – environmental constitutionalism is undeniably an influential and growing field of law and public policy with potential to advance and improve environmental outcomes in ways that only outright constitutionalism can. Environmental constitutionalism’s emergence is nothing short of astonishing. Arguably owing its genesis to the 1948 Universal Declaration on Human Rights, and 1966’s twin international covenants on Civil and Political and Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, it entered the lexicon at 1972’s Stockholm Convention on the Human Environment, which is widely considered to be the global impetus that sparked the exponential growth of international, regional and national environmental law regimes, including their rights- related aspects.

Environmental Rights and Wrongs: Implementing Environmental Constitutionalism

2019

As of 2018, the UN Environment Programme concludes that 88 countries have constitutionally instantiated an express constitutional right to a healthy environment. At least another dozen recognize a right to a healthy environment as implied by other rights, such as a right to life or dignity. Substantive environmental rights are also reflected at the subnational level in various countries, including Brazil, Germany and the United States. All told, the UN Environment Programme reports that 150 countries have environmental provisions in their constitutions, all contributing to what the current the UN Human Rights Council’s Special Rapporteur on the Right to a Healthy Environment has called an ‘environmental rights revolution.’ Moreover, about 130 nations are also subject to regional agreements that explicitly or by interpretation embody a right to a healthy environment, including the African Charter on Human and Peoples’ Rights (“all peoples shall have the right to a general satisfactory environment favorable to their development”). In addition, there are multi-faceted efforts at international, regional, national and local levels interrogating and explicating how people have fundamental rights to healthy surroundings, including the UN Environment’s Environmental Rights Initiative, appointment of the Special Rapporteur on the Right to a Healthy Environment, and associated proposals for international recognition of a such rights. But what’s unclear is whether and the extent to which recognizing environmental rights is worth the coin, yet, and if so, why it is a better use of time and energy than by, say, protecting other established rights, working to enact and enforce environmental laws, or by implementing other regimes, such as the UN Sustainable Development Goals. The results are mixed, despite a surfeit of good intentions and practices. Accordingly, this chapter invites candid, evidence-based conversation about whether and the extent to which rights to a healthy environment are implemented in general and judicially in particular.

The Future We Want and constitutionally enshrined procedural rights in environmental matters

2014

Constitutional guarantees of rights to information, participation and adjudication can help achieve an environmentally sustainable planet. Countries from around the globe met in Rio De Janeiro, Brazil in 2012 (‘Rio + 20’), to ‘renew our commitment to sustainable development and to ensure the promotion of an economically, socially and environmentally sustainable future for our planet and for present and future generations.’ The ‘outcome document’, called The Future We Want, contains 283 paragraphs delimiting discernible objectives fostering sustainable development, including poverty eradication, peace, prosperity and equality, and access to resources, water, funding, intellectual property, and technology.

Symposium on Global Environmental Constitutionalism: An Introduction and Overview

2015

Welcome to our symposium issue of the Widener Law Review, dedicated to the proceedings of a symposium on “Global Environmental Constitutionalism,” which we held at Widener University School of Law’s Delaware campus on April 11, 2014. Constitutions reflect the values most treasured by society, including rights to speak, vote, run for political office, worship or not; to due process and legal representation; against cruel and unusual punishment and taking private property without just compensation, and so on. Since the U.N. Declaration on Human Rights in 1948, many constitutions have also sought to guarantee so-called socioeconomic rights to dignity, education, health, and shelter. One such socioeconomic right that has enjoyed a great deal of attention in national and subnational constitutions is a right to a quality environment. Indeed, reflecting a global trend, scores of countries have affirmed that their citizens are entitled to healthy air, water, and land and that their constitution should guarantee certain environmental rights. Scores more have imposed duties on government or citizens to protect the environment. Dozens provide further process rights in environmental matters. Some even go so far as to provide constitutional recognition of rights of nature, sustainability, energy, water, public trust, climate change, and other constitutionally emerging areas. Most people live under constitutions that protect environmental rights in some way. Indeed, the constitutions of more than 165 of the 193 UN-recognized nations on the planet address environmental matters in some fashion, some by committing to environmental stewardship, others by recognizing a basic right to a quality environment and still others by ensuring a degree of public participation in environmental decision making.