Untapped capacity for resilience in environmental law

Abstract

Over the past several decades, environmental governance has made substantial progress in addressing environmental change, but emerging environmental problems require new innovations in law, policy, and governance. While expansive legal reform is unlikely to occur soon, there is untapped potential in existing laws to address environmental change, both by leveraging adaptive and transformative capacities within the law itself to enhance social-ecological resilience and by using those laws to allow social-ecological systems to adapt and transform. Legal and policy research to date has largely overlooked this potential, even though it offers a more expedient approach to addressing environmental change than waiting for full-scale environmental law reform. We highlight examples from the United States and the European Union of untapped capacity in existing laws for fostering resilience in social-ecological systems. We show that governments and other governance agents can make substantial advances in addressing environmental change in the short term-without major legal reform-by exploiting those untapped capacities, and we offer principles and strategies to guide such initiatives.

Keywords

resilience; law; social-ecological systems; environmental governance

Published in

Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America
2019, Volume: 116, number: 40, pages: 19899-19904 Publisher: NATL ACAD SCIENCES

SLU Authors

• Angeler, David

  • Department of Aquatic Sciences and Assessment, Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences
    

Sustainable Development Goals

SDG13 Climate action


UKÄ Subject classification

Political Science (excluding Public Administration Studies and Globalization Studies)
Law (excluding Law and Society)


Publication identifier

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1906247116

Permanent link to this page (URI)

https://res.slu.se/id/publ/102287