Environmental Governance and Sustainability

This timely volume provides fascinating insights into emerging developments in the field of legal governance of the environment at a time when environmental governance is increasingly concerned with far more than legal doctrine. The expert contributors are concerned with the totality of arrangements through which power and resources are deployed to protect and restore natural resources, and how the costs and benefits of this are allocated. They explore key issues such as: how the community exercises its democratic rights; how government responds to the needs of current and future generations and balances the interests of the powerful with the powerless; the freedoms and responsibilities of commerce and the holders of property; and the ways in which laws and policies are informed by science and other perspectives. The various ways in which legal scholarship is pivotal to good governance are thus highlighted, as is the extent of innovation being generated by current ecological, economic and social challenges. Clearly demonstrating the increasing breadth and depth of environmental law scholarship, this thought-provoking book will prove an invaluable reference tool for academics, students and researchers focusing on environmental law and development.