Magnetic law: Designing environmental enforcement laws to encourage us to go further

Suzanne Kingston, Edwin Alblas, Mícheál Callaghan, Julie Foulon
2021 Regulation & Governance  
The 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
more » ... e in environmental matters. Based on some 2000 surveys and over 150 interviews with stakeholders from three Member States -France, Ireland, and the Netherlandswe 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 proenvironmental predispositions.
doi:10.1111/rego.12416 fatcat:myuc3easo5gydjemzyok234xfy