Suchergebnisse

AbstractThe European Union has some of the world's most ambitious and highly developed environmental laws on its books, but their effectiveness is severely compromised by non‐compliance. With the UNECE Aarhus Convention (1998), Europe launched an innovative legal experiment, democratizing environmental enforcement by conferring third party citizens and environmental non‐governmental organizations (ENGOs) with legal rights of access to environmental information, public participation, and access to justice in environmental matters. Based on some 2000 surveys and over 150 interviews with stakeholders from three Member States – France, Ireland, and the Netherlands – we adopt a holistic, 360° perspective, capturing the views of regulated parties, NGOs, and the general public on this private governance experiment. Our data provide important new insights into the practical effectiveness of Europe's laws enabling private environmental enforcement, its (intended and unintended) effects on farmers' compliance decisions in the vital area of nature conservation, and how law might be used to stimulate pro‐environmental predispositions.

Intro -- Title Page -- Copyright Page -- The Authors -- Table of Contents -- List of Abbreviations -- Acknowledgements -- General Introduction -- 1. AN OUTLINE OF FRENCH CONSTITUTIONAL HISTORY -- I. From Constitutional Revolutions to the Emergence of the Parliamentary Regime (1789-1875) -- II. The Third Republic (1875-1940) -- A. The Institutions of the Third Republic -- B. The Practice of the Regime -- III. The Fourth Republic (1946-1958) -- A. The Institutions of the Fourth Republic -- B. The Practice of the Regime -- IV. The Fifth Republic (1958 to Present) -- A. Adoption of the Constitution -- B. Evolution of the Constitution -- 2. CHARACTERISTICS OF THE FRENCH STATE -- I. The Indivisibility of the Republic -- A. A Unitary State -- B. A Decentralized Organization -- II. Secularism -- III. A Democratic and Social Republic -- A. Democracy and the Rule of Law -- B. A Social Republic -- IV. The Political Regime -- A. A Parliamentary Republic -- B. A Semi-Presidential Regime -- 1. The Pre-eminence of the President of the Republic -- 2. The Periods of Cohabitation -- 3. STATE TERRITORY -- I. A Complex Territorial Organization -- II. Powers of Local Authorities -- 4. POPULATION AND DEMOGRAPHICS -- Selected Further Reading -- Part I. Sources of Constitutional Law -- Chapter 1. Treaties -- 1. THE TREATY-MAKING POWER -- 2. THE POSITION OF INTERNATIONAL TREATIES IN THE DOMESTIC NORMATIVE HIERARCHY -- I. The Supra-Legislative and Infra-Constitutional Position of International Treaties -- II. The Subordination of International Treaties to the Constitution -- A. The General Subordination of International Treaties to the Constitution -- B. The Special Constitutional Position of EU Law -- Chapter 2. The Constitution -- 1. THE CHARACTERISTICS OF CONSTITUTIONAL NORMS -- I. The Supremacy of the Constitution.

AbstractIn the battle to address Europe's biodiversity crisis, fixing its implementation gap—the gap between EU nature law on the books, and on the ground—is vital. Europe's private nature governance revolution, underpinned by the UNECE Aarhus Convention, is a core part of its response. This article breaks new empirical ground in understanding how those mechanisms have been working in practice, and their knock-on effects for traditional enforcement by the State. We develop an innovative methodological tool, the Nature Governance Effectiveness Indicators ("NGEIs"), enabling the first quantitative measurement of the effectiveness of public and private nature governance in practice. In collecting data on these indicators, we create a novel dataset spanning three jurisdictions and 23 years, giving a unique insight into Europe's "environmental democracy in action". We regress the NGEIs against the Nature Governance Index, an original longitudinal index measuring the evolution in nature governance laws over this period. Our results provide the first systematic empirical evidence that, despite the widespread embrace of private nature governance laws on the books across our studied jurisdictions from 1992 to 2015, the enhanced citizens' rights conferred by these laws are not being consistently used in practice. They also reveal that, despite these inconsistencies in usage of the Aarhus mechanisms in practice, passing private governance laws can in fact improve levels of State enforcement of EU nature law in practice. For policymakers seeking to increase enforcement of EU nature law on the ground, harnessing what we term the shadow of heterarchy, by strengthening private governance rights, may therefore be a more effective means of doing so than simply ratcheting up existing traditional governance mechanisms such as levels of maximum criminal penalties or civil fines.

AbstractEuropean environmental governance has radically transformed over the past two decades. While traditionally enforcement of environmental law has been the responsibility of public authorities (public authorities of the EU Member States, themselves policed by the European Commission), this paradigm has now taken a democratic turn. Led by changes in international environmental law and in particular the UNECE Aarhus Convention (UNECE, United Nations Economic Commission for Europe Convention (1998). Convention on access to information, public participation in decision-making and Access to Justice in Environmental Matters (the Aarhus Convention), signed on June 25, 1998.), EU law now gives important legal rights to members of the public and environmental non-governmental organisations ("ENGOs") to become involved in environmental governance, by means of accessing environmental information, participating in environmental decision-making and bringing legal proceedings. While doctrinal legal and regulatory scholarship on this embrace of "bottom-up" private environmental governance is now substantial, there has been relatively little quantitative research in the field. This article represents a first step in mapping this evolution of environmental governance laws in the EU. We employ a leximetrics methodology, coding over 6000 environmental governance laws from three levels of legal sources (international, EU and national), to provide the first systematic data showing the transformation of European environmental governance regimes. We develop the Nature Governance Index ("NGI") to measure how the enforcement tools deployed in international, EU and national law have changed over time, from the birth of the EU's flagship nature conservation law, the 1992 Habitats Directive (Directive 92/43/EEC). At the national level, we focus on three EU Member States (France, Ireland and the Netherlands) to enable a fine-grained measurement of the changes in national nature governance laws over time. This article introduces our unique datasets and the NGI, describes the process used to collect the datasets and its limitations, and compares the evolution in laws at the international, EU and national levels over the 23-year period from 1992–2015. Our findings provide strong empirical confirmation of the democratic turn in European environmental governance, while revealing the significant divergences between legal systems that remain absent express harmonisation of the Aarhus Convention's principles in EU law. Our data also set the foundations for future quantitative legal research, enabling deeper analysis of the relationships between the different levels of multilevel environmental governance.