Environmental Discourses in Public and International Law

This collection of essays examines the development and application of environmental laws and the relationship between public laws and international law. Notions of good governance, transparency and fairness in decision-making are analysed within the area of the law perceived as having the greatest potential to address today's global environmental concerns. International trends, such as free trade and environmental markets, are also observed to be infiltrating national laws. Together, the essays illustrate the idea that in the context of environmental problems being dynamic and environmental changes appearing suddenly, laws become difficult to design and effect. Typically, they are also devised within a conflicted setting. It is in this changeable and discordant context that environmental discourses such as precaution, justice, risk, equity, security, citizenship and markets contribute to legal responses, present legal opportunities or hinder progress.

• Offers transdisciplinary insights and introduces a social science theoretical framework into environmental law which opens up the legal discipline to social scientists and vice versa

• Demonstrates the development of ideas and the increased dominance of discourses about environmental problems

• Challenges conventional views about the development of environmental law and the relationships between public law and international law, thereby presenting novel views and perspectives on a developing field of law