International Environmental Law’s Lack of Normative Ambition: an Opportunity for the Global Pact for the Environment?

Abstract

This paper argues that international environmental law (iel) is not sufficiently ambitious to confront the Anthropocene’s socio-ecological crisis. The critique specifically focuses on iel’s lack of ambitious and “unmentionable” ecological norms such as rights of nature, Earth system integrity, and ecological sustainability that are not yet considered to be part of the corpus of iel, but that arguably should be in light of the prevailing and ever-deepening socio-ecological crisis. Assuming that the recent Global Pact for the Environment initiative and its accompanying United Nations-mandated report that assesses possible gaps in iel are indicative of the type of reforms we might expect of iel now and in future, the paper determines if and the extent to which the Global Pact initiative embraces ambitious norms and addresses iel’s “unmentionable” normative gaps. A secondary, but related, objective of the paper is to briefly respond to the recent view that any radical critique of the Global Pact initiative is either unfounded, unwarranted or undesirable.

[Retracted] Roles of International Environmental Law in China’s Environmental Productivity: Challenges and Implications

“…Due to the large gap between the actual conditions in different parts of China, it is difficult for China to formulate uniform rigid regulations in the actual legislative process, which provides regions with a lot of autonomy. In this reality, Guangxi's environmental productivity has developed rapidly, and many regulations and management methods related to the environment have been proposed [14][15][16]. For example, Guangxi promulgated the "Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region Nanning Qingxiu Mountain Protection Regulations" to escort the development of environmental productivity.…”

A Global Pact for the Environment: The Logical Outcome of 50 Years of International Environmental Law

“…The main critique of a Global Pact concerns whether and how it would interact with the legal obligations of pre-existing environmental agreements [100][101][102][103][104][105]. As mentioned above, the five states who voted against the adoption of the Global Pact's enabling resolution expressed concerns that the Global Pact was not necessary because of existing environmental agreements, or that the Global Pact could confuse existing obligations in other environmental agreements.…”

Earth System Law for the Anthropocene

“…These include, for example, international environmental law's support of several foundational paradigms that underlie global economic, political, legal, and social human systems such as: anthropocentric sustainable development, (neo) colonialism, property rights, state sovereignty, and neoliberal corporate exploitation [30]. As I have shown elsewhere in some detail [30,31], international environmental law (mostly implicitly, but often also explicitly), structurally contributes to causing, sustaining, and exacerbating these predatory paradigms that, in turn, result in Earth system destruction, exploitation, and the oppression of vulnerable humans (mostly those situated in the Global South) and oppression of the non-human world (see also references [32,33]).…”