Edward Elgar Publishing Implementing Environmental Law (The IUCN Academy of Environmental Law series)

This insightful book explores why implementation of environmental law is too often ineffective in achieving effective environmental governance. It provides careful analysis and innovative proposals to help improve the practical effectiveness of legal instruments for environmental governance. A growing number of organisations including the IUCN, UNEP and the Organisation of American States have voiced concerns that legal instruments that have developed to pursue more effective environmental governance over the last 40 years are not creating a sufficiently effective and efficient system of environmental governance. In response to this challenge, this timely book explores ways to bridge the significant implementation gap between the objectives of environmental law and the real-world outcomes of its application. Expert contributors discuss different forms of law, from international conventions down to inter partes agreements, and non-government codes and standards. The overarching discussion highlights the diverse factors that impact upon implementing environmental law in practice, and considers the limitations and opportunities for effective innovation in legal governance.This book is a comprehensive reference point for both scholars and policy-makers alike, shedding light on how to achieve significant improvements in the effective application of environmental law. Review 'The effective implementation as distinct from the enforcement of environmental laws depends upon a range of discrete factors. These include institutional, cultural, social, economic, political as well as traditional legal influences and perspectives. This series of essays explains and analyses the theoretical underpinnings of the relationship between all of these factors and the methodology appropriate to determining in practice whether environmental laws are being implemented so that their objectives are being achieved. This involves a review of the growing theoretical literature and a discussion of a significant number of examples, international, regional, national and local, which assess the extent of effective implementation of the relevant legal rules. The strength of these essays is two fold: the depth of the theoretical discourse and the breadth of the indicative practical examples. These essays will add considerable grist to the intellectual mill of those interested in the perception of environmental governance as an emerging global system.' --- Douglas Fisher, Queensland University of Technology, Australia About the Author Edited by Paul Martin, Professor, University of New England, Armidale NSW and Amanda Kennedy, Professor of Law, Faculty of Law, Queensland University of Technology, Australia