Chapter 4 analyses how England’s environmental information regime, set out in the Environmental Information Regulations 2004 (EIR), have guaranteed the right of access to environmental information. The chapter focuses on how the EIR reflects or fails to reflect the core elements of the right. The chapter analyses the various aspects of the EIR regime: the scope of the EIR; the requirements imposed on users seeking to submit requests for access to environmental information; the obligations imposed on a public authority in responding to requests for environmental information; the power granted to public authorities to levy charges; the ability of public authorities to withhold environmental information from disclosure; and the review procedures available to users to challenge the decisions of public authorities and their treatment of requests. The chapter identifies that England’s conceptualisation of the right reflects the environmental protection aims and identity-blind conceptualisation of the Aarhus Convention. The chapter concludes that the Aarhus Convention has had a normative impact on how the right is conceptualised and guaranteed in England.

Chapter 3 examines the Aarhus Convention. The chapter begins by charting the events leading up to the Aarhus Convention and the Convention’s core provisions guaranteeing the right of access to environmental information. The chapter then explores how the Aarhus Convention conceptualises the right of access to environmental information, identifying how the Convention interprets the core substantive and procedural elements of the right. Using this analysis, the chapter identifies the extent to which the Aarhus Convention has influenced the development of the right in England, and its limited influence in the US and China. This is significant, as the influence (or lack thereof) of the Aarhus Convention demonstrates that, contrary to popular belief, the Convention does not exert a normative influence over the core substantive elements of the right.

Chapter 8 is the concluding chapter of this text, bringing together the key themes and findings of the monograph. The chapter begins by re-highlighting the possibilities of the different jurisdictions acting as sources of legal reforms for the other jurisdictions, and the interactions between these reforms in relation to the right’s core elements under legal transplant theory. Building on these findings and those relating to the likelihood of convergence occurring under the right, the chapter moves to discuss the deeper implication of the text for the right and its origins. The chapter concludes by reconnecting these findings and the right of access to environmental information with the broader environmental issues that are faced by Earth today.

The introductory chapter sets out how the right of access to environmental information was developed at the international level and its relevance to current environmental decision-making processes and environmental regulation. This chapter also introduces legal transplant theory and the Aarhus Convention, which provide the theoretical and legal framework, respectively, that acts as the text’s anchoring point. The chapter also sets out the three legal jurisdictions where the legislature’s efforts to guarantee the right will be analysed, providing the scope of the text.

Chapter 7 explores the ramifications of the preceding analysis through the theoretical lens of legal transplant theory. It identifies what substantive and procedural elements are key to achieving the right’s environmental and participative aims and whether the selected jurisdictions’ environmental information regimes contain these elements. The chapter then considers why certain transplants are more likely to be successfully implemented than others, building on the distinction between the core substantive elements and the core procedural elements. This analysis will also consider the role of the Aarhus Convention in promoting or inhibiting legal transplants in light of its impact on the procedures of the selected jurisdictions’ environmental information regime. Finally, the chapter reflects on how the right of access to environmental information is likely to develop into the future, exploring the alternative conceptualisations of the right and considering whether a full convergence of the selected jurisdictions’ environmental information regimes is likely or desirable.

A rapidly deteriorating supply of healthy freshwater resources, exacerbated by climate change, intensifies social and economic injustices and inequalities across the world. Strong public laws and institutions upholding equitable procedures for public participation, access to justice and information regarding the fair distribution of access to sufficient water resources are needed more than ever to protect the most vulnerable. International water law and river basin treaties have poor provisions for public participation. This chapter demonstrates how the UNECE environmental regime, especially through the Aarhus Convention and Protocol on Water and Health, provides a comprehensive framework for the principle of public participation, access to justice and information, including identifying where it fills gaps in international water law and basin treaties. For example, non-state actors including the public and non-governmental organisations (NGOs) have limited almost non-existent rights under the 1997 UN Watercourses Convention beyond the procedure on non-discriminatory access to justice. In contrast, the public including NGOs are given a significant participatory role in law making, implementation and enforcement in the UNECE water regime. This contributes to procedural justice and the principle of intra-generational equity in international water law. The Water Convention, however, should be amended to provide for all three pillars of public participation.

Evaluating effectiveness of resilience governance is connected to the ecological factors. Hence, evaluating effectiveness of the role of law in governance for resilience is not just a question of legal compliance and control in a traditional sense. Beside the set of components for effective governance the essence of creating resilience is about understanding the social-ecological system. Understanding its drivers and thresholds to alternative states and make the system stay in the resilient state or move towards a better alterative state. One aspect of assessing the role of law is to assess to what extent law provides an appropriate legal design in terms of adaptivity, polycentric institutions, and participation as such. These components are all connected to effectiveness and controlling the ecosystem. However, for law to be effective legal compliance must be monitored. For the purpose of social-ecological resilience, a non-confrontational or adaptive control system is most likely to be successful.

Stakeholder participation is key for resilience governance and management. Participation is important for bottom-up approaches in adaptive governance, where self-organization and local knowledge are important factors. Different kinds of participation are also important for structural and monitoring issues in multi-level governance. Stakeholders, or NGOs, are in this sense important both in transferring knowledge and information in multidimensional governance structures and for bridging structural or institutional gaps. Emphasizing the role of stakeholder participation can be seen as a democratic and decentralized approach. Participation by the public is seen as an important feature for assuring transparency, legitimacy, and accountability, which have been established as important for governance structures in general. Trust building and effectiveness are also closely tied to issues of participation. Law generally includes pathways for participation at all levels. However, the purpose of participation in legal structures is somewhat different than the purpose of participation in resilience governance.

The chapter proposes public participation as a principle of ‘good’ energy governance that legitimatises energy decisions and fosters their social acceptance. Adopting a public international law perspective, it highlights how the Convention on Access to Information, Public Participation in Decision-Making and Access to Justice in Environmental Matters (Aarhus Convention) constrains domestic decision making in the energy sector. Paying special attention to the contribution of the committee charged with reviewing state compliance with the convention’s obligations, it offers a detailed analysis of its conclusions and recommendations in the context of two cases: the United Kingdom’s decision to build a nuclear power station in Hinkley Point and the design of a renewable energy policy in Scotland. On that basis, the chapter concludes on the increasingly important role that international law plays in democratising energy decision-making processes.

In this chapter, we discuss the evolution of the field of ‘ethics of nuclear energy’, regarding its past, present and future. We will first review the history of this field in the previous four decades, focusing on new and emerging challenges of nuclear energy production and waste disposal, in light of several important developments. Four of the most pressing ethical challenges will be further reviewed in the chapter. First, what is a morally ‘acceptable’ nuclear energy production method, if we consider the existing and possible new technologies? Second, provided a new tendency to consider nuclear waste disposal with several countries, what would be the new ethical and governance challenges of these multinational collaborations? Third, how should we deal with the (safety) challenges of the new geographic distribution of nuclear energy, tilting towards emerging economies with less experience with nuclear technology? Fourth, nuclear energy projects engender highly emotional controversies. Neither ignoring the emotions of the public nor taking them as a reason to prohibit or restrict a technology – we call them technocratic populist pitfalls respectively – seem to be able to guide responsible policy making.

Because of its transboundary effects and because states will be the primary actors, large-scale solar geoengineering and its governance are matters of international law. This is the final of four chapters that consider international legal rules, here those that fall outside the previous chapters’ scopes. Multilateral agreements govern activities and impacts in areas beyond national jurisdiction, including Antarctica, outer space, and the oceans. The comprehensive UN Convention on the Law of the Sea governs solar geoengineering that would take place in the marine environment or would likely result in deleterious effects there. The parties to the Convention on Biological Diversity, a far-reaching agreement, have issued three nonbinding decisions concerning geoengineering, the only such negotiated consensuses from representatives of most countries. The Convention on the Prohibition of Military or Any Other Hostile Use of Environmental Modification Techniques proscribes solar geoengineering's hostile use. Among the four major international legal forums that help resolve disputes in broad ranges of issues, the UN Security Council could address problematic or contentious solar geoengineering.