Formally adopted in 2012, environmental public interest litigation in China has expanded standing beyond individual rights by granting administrative authorities, procuratorates, and non-governmental organizations (NGOs) the ability to initiate environmental public interest litigation (PIL). However, the aims of enhancing the enforcement of environmental regulation and the development of the ‘objective legality’ model through civil society have not been met. This is as a result of administrative authorities and procuratorates being granted standing, which inhibits NGOs from initiating their own PIL in line with the aims of the ‘objective legality’ model. In order to promote participation by civil society and its actors in environmental law enforcement, NGOs should be granted preferential standing in environmental PIL. To this end, the current requirements for NGOs to be granted standing should be relaxed, and the standing granted to administrative authorities and procuratorates should be limited or removed.
The book discusses the normative impact of the Aarhus Convention on how England, America and China guarantees the right of access to environmental information. Through this analysis the book identifies each of these jurisdictions' unique conceptualisations of the right which, in turn, influences the design of their respective environmental information regimes. This allows these jurisdictions potentially to act as sources of legal reforms for each other to improve how the right is guaranteed via legal transplant theory, challenging the normativity of the Aarhus Convention. This is not to suggest that the Aarhus Convention exerts no normative influence on how the right is guaranteed; there are core substantive and core procedural elements which have to be met for the right to be effectively guaranteed, and the book shows that the Aarhus Convention does exert a normative influence over the procedural elements of the right.
The right of access to environmental information has become a key aspect of contemporary efforts to promote environmental governance in the UK. The right is enshrined in international law through the Aarhus Convention which, alongside other legal developments, has influenced how academics analyse the right in the UK. How research into the right has been conducted is significant because it has led to gaps in how we understand the right and undermines environmental protection efforts. This article identifies and critiques the common analytical trends used to analyse the right of access to environmental information in the UK. The article considers two of these trends, examining their negative impact and the role of the Aarhus Convention in creating these trends. The article concludes by discussing the need to critically engage with these knowledge gaps to improve how the right is guaranteed and, ultimately, the implementation of environmental protection efforts.
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