Description
Empowering Through Law - Edwin AlblasThe European Union is commonly regarded as a global field runner in terms of its ambitious and highly developed body of environmental laws on its books, in fields ranging from climate law to industrial emissions, water and air pollution, nanotechnology and nature conservation The effectiveness of these laws is, however, severely compromised by under-enforcement. Encouraging ‘bottom-up’ enforcement is a central plank of the EU’s efforts to deal with this serious problem. With the 1998 Aarhus Convention, Europe launched an innovative legal experiment in environmental governance, democratising environmental enforcement by conferring third party citizens and environmental non-governmental organisations (‘ENGOs’) with legal rights of access to environmental information, public participation and access to justice in environmental matters.
Focusing on the role of ENGOs in the (private) enforcement of EU environmental law, this study offers a cross-country empirical investigation of Europe’s attempt to revolutionise environmental governance by means of law. Based on 75 surveys and 30 interviews with ENGOs from three selected Member States – France, Ireland and the Netherlands we build on recent advancements in scholarship on ‘regulatory intermediary theories’ by showing how European ENGOs play a vital role intermediating between (1) national states and their citizens, but also (2) between the EU and national citizens, and even (3) between the EU and Member States. We therefore bring new empirical insights into the role of law as an enabler of regulatory intermediaries, and law’s potential as a tool for orchestrating regulatory intermediaries. We also develop the literature on ‘chameleonic’ intermediaries that can take different roles in multilevel governance settings, demonstrating a ‘tri-facing’ role of ENGOs as intermediaries. Finally, our study is the first examining the role of regulatory intermediaries in the field of environmental enforcement, linking this to the compliance and regulatory enrolment literature, and questioning whether citizens’ intrinsic motivations to comply with the law may potentially be crowded out (or crowded in) by significant reliance on ENGOs as intermediaries.
Speaker: Edwin Alblas, post-doc researcher at the department of Energy Law & Sustainability, presented his research on environmental law and regulation, which he conducted at the Sutherland School of Law, University College Dublin (UCD).
| Period | Oct 2021 |
|---|---|
| Event type | Seminar |
| Location | GroningenShow on map |
| Degree of Recognition | National |