Planning is at the heart of the response to many of the significant challenges of our time, from the climate and environmental crises to social and economic inequalities. It is embedded in, as well ...as partially constituting, our democratic systems, so that the challenges of democratic decision-making in a complex society cannot be avoided when thinking about planning. Planning law raises some of the most fundamental questions faced by legal scholars, from the legitimacy of authority to the relationship between public and private rights and interests. And yet, planning law has been relatively neglected by legal scholars. The objective of Taking English Planning Law Scholarship Seriously is to create space for planning law scholarship in all of its variety, and for curiosity about law in all of its complexity. The chapters reflect this diversity and complexity, covering a range of the objects of planning (from housing to energy to highways) and a multiplicity of planning tasks and tools (from compulsory purchase to contracting to planning inquiries).
Environmental Groups and Legal Expertise explores the
use and understanding of law and legal expertise by
environmental groups. Rather than the usual focus on the court
room, it scrutinises ...environmental NGO advocacy during the
extraordinarily dramatic Brexit process, from the referendum on
leaving the EU in June 2016 to the debate around the new
Environment Bill in the first half of 2020. There is generally a
weak understanding of both the complexity and the potential of
legal expertise in the environmental NGO community. Legal expertise
can be more than a tool for campaigners, and more than litigation:
it provides distinctive ways of both seeing the world and changing
the world. The available legal resource in the sector is not just a
practical limit on what can be done, but spills into the
very understanding of what should be done, and what
resource is needed. Mutually reinforcing links between capacity,
understanding, culture and investment affect legal expertise across
the board. There are, however, pockets of sophisticated legal
expertise in the community, and legal expertise was heavily and
often effectively used in the anomalously law-heavy
Brexit-environment debate. The ability to call on thinly spread
legal expertise in a crisis was in part due to effective NGO
collaboration around Brexit-environment.
Abstract
This article explores the relative neglect by environmental NGOs—at least until recently—of the middle, public participation, pillar of the Aarhus Convention. This can be seen in litigation, ...as well as in political advocacy, both domestically and at the international (Aarhus) level. Interviews with some key actors in this area and analysis of published documents provide insights into NGO decision-making. The limits of law become clear—Aarhus rights are made real only through the commitment of governments and civil society. A nuanced combination of internal and external factors contributes to explaining the lack of NGO attention to Aarhus’ middle pillar. We may also see some indications that NGOs envisage participation as a process properly dominated by expertise. This is far from uniform, however, and other parts of the community clearly appreciate and value the significance of lay participation in the environmental arena.
Designing a system of regulation that will deliver defined policy objectives is not easy. This is particularly so when regulating new technologies, where challenges relating to uncertainty and risk, ...resource asymmetry, and regulatory disconnection are especially significant. By adopting a pluralistic, decentred approach to regulation that utilizes a range of soft-law regulatory techniques, non-state actors can contribute in a variety of ways to these special challenges. However, using non-state resources in this way (either formally or informally) is not a panacea. Public trust and confidence in the regulation of risk is crucial in ensuring the viability of the control framework. Yet, it is difficult to maintain, not least because regulatory pluralism often envisages state and industry cooperation. Nevertheless, the involvement of non-state actors, including industry, is important if the regulatory framework is not to hamper technological development or expose the public to unacceptable risks.
Monitoring and enforcement issues must be analysed when determining the effectiveness of pollution control regulation, and clearly influence choices about how to regulate. This book demonstrates how ...an economic analysis of law enforcement can generate important insights into how best to enforce pollution control regulation. It seeks to provide a clear and accessible way into the law and economics literature on enforcement. More specifically, it uses Gary Becker’s deterrence model which, by differentiating between two enforcement variables (namely the probability of apprehension and conviction and the severity of sanction), facilitates a comparison of the effectiveness of different enforcement tools in inducing desirable behaviour. As such, it provides a valuable analytical tool in considering how best to pursue cost-effective enforcement. Major themes to be addressed include Becker’s deterrence model and expansions thereof, reasons for compliance, environmental enforcement strategies and the importance of a deterrence threat and formal pollution control law enforcement mechanisms such as prosecution and criminal sanctions, administrative mechanisms and civil liability. The book argues that in pursuing cost-effective enforcement much can be learned from examining enforcement practices in different jurisdictions, and to this end the author examines pollution control laws, enforcement strategies and sanctions in Australia, Canada and England and Wales. The book makes an important contribution to existing literature on environmental law enforcement, but its value extends beyond this. The theoretical framework adopted and the range of issues discussed make it of interest to regulatory and public law scholars more generally.
Environmental Groups and Legal Expertise explores theuse and understanding of law and legal expertise by environmental groups. Rather than the usual focus on the court room, it scrutinises ...environmental NGO advocacy during the extraordinarily dramatic Brexit process, from the referendum on leaving the EU in June 2016 to the debate around the new Environment Bill in the first half of 2020. There is generally a weak understanding of both the complexity and the potential of legal expertise in the environmental NGO community. Legal expertise can be more than a tool for campaigners, and more than litigation: it provides distinctive ways of both seeing the world and changing the world. The available legal resource in the sector is not just a practical limit on what can be done, but spills into the very understanding of what should be done, and what resource is needed. Mutually reinforcing links between capacity, understanding, culture and investment affect legal expertise across the board. There are, however, pockets of sophisticated legal expertise in the community, and legal expertise was heavily and often effectively used in the anomalously law-heavy Brexit-environment debate. The ability to call on thinly spread legal expertise in a crisis was in part due to effective NGO collaboration around Brexit-environment.
The inclusion of private actors in EU environmental governance, and indeed in other areas of regulation at all levels, is absolutely routine. A decentred approach to regulation and governance ...recognizes that private parties hold key resources that may enhance any aspect of the regulatory process, from information provision, to standard-setting, to enforcement. In this paper, we acknowledge that the inclusion of economic actors in environmental governance is crucial for environmental protection; but equally that their role does raise some signicant concerns, particularly in terms of accountability and (input and output) legitimacy. We examine below the efforts made in EU environmental law to respond to those concerns, and argue that EU law has developed important safeguard mechanisms to address concerns about economic actors.
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