Implementing Environmental Constitutionalism


Book Description

Constitutions can play a central role in responding to environmental challenges, such as pollution, biodiversity loss, lack of drinking water, and climate change. The vast majority of people on earth live under constitutional systems that protect the environment or recognize environmental rights. Such environmental constitutionalism, however, falls short without effective implementation by policymakers, advocates and jurists. Implementing Environmental Constitutionalism: Current Global Challenges explains and explores this 'implementation gap'. This collection is both broad and deep. While some of the essays analyze crosscutting themes, such as climate change and the need for rule of law that affect the implementation of environmental constitutionalism throughout the world, others delve deeply into geographically contextual experiences for lessons about how constitutional environmental law might be more effectively implemented. This volume informs global conversations about whether and how environmental constitutionalism can be made more effective to protect the natural environment.




Environmental Justice: Pathways to Environmental Protection in Nigeria


Book Description

This is the Trilogy Collection; VOLUME THREE. It is part of the professional, educational and informational book; an effort to critique the ideological basis of climate change analysis, the brainchild of the Inter-governmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and others. The book profers a unique socio-political, econo-cultural and legal perspective on the larger subject of the environment. Of major concern is their policy implications to the developing world's quest to industrialize in the 21st century or so soon thereafter. A greater premise of the thesis in this book contends that environmental advocates are far more effective if they understood the milieu, the underlining cultural dimensions, the motivating ethos, alien ideologies and programmes, cleverly strewn around the globe under the guise of sustainable development; instead rapid industrialization for the under-developed world, especially when all environment is local. Therefore, I posed many comparative and empirical alternatives aimed primarily at eliciting or deducing the diversity of viable solutions to better equip policymakers with multiple, alternative and/or base-loaded perspectives. I then attempt to explain how environmental justice benefit communities of individuals in many different ways in advancing sustainable industrialization, in deliberate preference to just sustainable development. In this regard and in furtherance of true democracy, government at the several and various levels must ensure the patronage and engagement of their very best for sustainable development. Therefore, in the broader sense of environmental justice, especially in the developing world's context, renewable energy should not be limited to natural (energy) resources alone, but also extended to the efficient human resources' energy use and sustainable living or development. Topics are carefully selected and succinctly dealt with in this book to cover as much interrelated grounds as possible, while staying true to the very essence of the thesis: Environmental justice. Accordingly, this book takes on an interconnected, the multi-disciplinary and integrative approach to environmental issues to finding Sustainable solutions to the myriad of problems facing humanity and communities today. Contrastingly, Sustainable development mostly concerns itself with the preservative interrelationship between humans and nature's environment including natural resources, in such manner as not to jeopardize the chances of future generations to also enjoy these resources. Therefore, sustainable development would also entail the concept of sensible land use and the efficient consumption of natural resources, so as to avoid its depletion. For instance, throughout America's history, federal land laws have reflected two visions of public and private land ownership. The American experience showed the tension between private ownerships and public interests in lands needing a multi-disciplinary approach to resolve the conflict. Unsurprisingly, the management of common resources occupied the center stage in the 60s and 70s. It may be safe to presume that leaders of the environmental movements of this era were understandably preservationists and conservationists: They were not profiteers. We must, therefore, be able to differentiate between the environmental conservatism that bothers on nature's environmental protection in reverence to its Creator, and the post-modernist (liberal) elements of environmentalism. The former is clearly advocated for in this book. Environmental conservatism concerns itself with the cultural, ethical and spiritual attributes of and to nature, in spite of scientific considerations or validations.




Global Environmental Constitutionalism


Book Description

Reflecting a global trend, scores of countries have affirmed that their citizens are entitled to healthy air, water, and land and that their constitution should guarantee certain environmental rights. This book examines the increasing recognition that the environment is a proper subject for protection in constitutional texts and for vindication by constitutional courts. This phenomenon, which the authors call environmental constitutionalism, represents the confluence of constitutional law, international law, human rights, and environmental law. National apex and constitutional courts are exhibiting a growing interest in environmental rights, and as courts become more aware of what their peers are doing, this momentum is likely to increase. This book explains why such provisions came into being, how they are expressed, and the extent to which they have been, and might be, enforced judicially. It is a singular resource for evaluating the content of and hope for constitutional environmental rights.




Implementing Environmental Constitutionalism


Book Description

Constitutions can play a central role in responding to environmental challenges, such as pollution, biodiversity loss, lack of drinking water, and climate change. The vast majority of people on earth live under constitutional systems that protect the environment or recognize environmental rights. Such environmental constitutionalism, however, falls short without effective implementation by policymakers, advocates and jurists. Implementing Environmental Constitutionalism: Current Global Challenges explains and explores this 'implementation gap'. This collection is both broad and deep. While some of the essays analyze crosscutting themes, such as climate change and the need for rule of law that affect the implementation of environmental constitutionalism throughout the world, others delve deeply into geographically contextual experiences for lessons about how constitutional environmental law might be more effectively implemented. This volume informs global conversations about whether and how environmental constitutionalism can be made more effective to protect the natural environment.




The Cambridge Handbook of Environmental Justice and Sustainable Development


Book Description

Despite the global endorsement of the Sustainable Development Goals, environmental justice struggles are growing all over the world. These struggles are not isolated injustices, but symptoms of interlocking forms of oppression that privilege the few while inflicting misery on the many and threatening ecological collapse. This handbook offers critical perspectives on the multi-dimensional, intersectional nature of environmental injustice and the cross-cutting forms of oppression that unite and divide these struggles, including gender, race, poverty, and indigeneity. The work sheds new light on the often-neglected social dimension of sustainability and its relationship to human rights and environmental justice. Using a variety of legal frameworks and case studies from around the world, this volume illustrates the importance of overcoming the fragmentation of these legal frameworks and social movements in order to develop holistic solutions that promote justice and protect the planet's ecosystems at a time of intensifying economic and ecological crisis.




Globalization, Environmental Law, and Sustainable Development in the Global South


Book Description

This volume examines the impact of globalization on international environmental law and the implementation of sustainable development in the Global South. Comprising contributions from lawyers from the Global South or who have experience in the Global South, this volume is organized into three parts, with a thematic inquiry woven through every chapter to ask how law can enable economies that can be sustained, given the limited carrying capacity of the earth. Part I describes and characterizes the status quo of environmental and economic problems in the Global South during the process of globalization. Some of those problems include redistribution of environmental burden on the public through over-reliance on the state in emerging economies and the transition to public-private partnerships, as well as extreme uncontrolled economic expansion. Building on Part I, Part II takes an international perspective by presenting some tools that are in place during the process of globalization that lead to friction and interfaces between developed and developing economies in environmental law. Recognizing the impossibility of a globalized Northern economy, the authors in Part III present some alternatives through framework ideas of human and civil rights, environmental rights, and indigenous persons’ rights, as well as concrete and specific legal tools to strengthen justice and rule of law institutions. The book gives new perspectives to familiar approaches through concrete examples by professional practitioners and theoretical discourse by academic researchers, and can thereby form the basis for changes in practices, as well as further discussions and comparisons. This book will be of great interest to students and scholars of environmental law, sustainable development, and globalization and international relations, as well as legal professionals and practitioners.




Environmental Justice and Environmentalism


Book Description

In ten essays, contributors from a variety of disciplines consider such topics as the relationship between the two movements' ethical commitments and activist goals, instances of successful cooperation in U.S. contexts, and the challenges posed to both movements by globalisation and climate change.




Human Rights and the Environment under African Union Law


Book Description

This book brings together original and novel perspectives on major developments in human rights law and the environment in Africa. Focusing on African Union law, the book explores the core concepts and principles, theory and practice, accountability mechanisms and key issues challenging human rights law in the era of global environmental change. It, thus, extend the frontier of understanding in this fundamental area by building on existing scholarship on African human rights law and the protection of the environment, divulging concerns on redressing environmental and human rights protection issues in the context of economic growth and sustainable development. It further offers unique insight into the development, domestication and implementation challenges relating to human rights law and environmental governance in Africa. This long overdue interdisciplinary exploration of human rights law and the environment from an African perspective will be an indispensable reference point for academics, policymakers, practitioners and advocates of international human rights and environmental law in particular and international law, environmental politics and philosophy, and African studies in general. It is clear that there is much to do, study and share on this timely subject in the African context.




Our Common Future


Book Description




Pathways to Peacebuilding


Book Description

Given the consistent challenge of Islamist acute violence, particularly in Nigeria, this monograph attempts to respond to the question: How can Jesus's followers pattern response to violence after Jesus's model demonstrated in his triumph over death, evil, sin, and violence through staurocentric pathways? And how can Jesus's followers in Nigeria adopt the same staurocentric model in order to not only overcome acute violence within the country but also to extend hands, heads, hearts, and homes of staurocentric forgiveness, hospitality, and other practices toward Muslims? In this study, I posit that peacebuilding contextual theology be grounded on the mystery of the cross (σταυρός-stauros)--a theologico-theoretical framework that the church in Nigeria should espouse in order to position herself to extend hands, heads, hearts, and homes of staurocentric practices, whose appropriation must be undertaken through constructive and critical integration of the God-given African peacebuilding concepts autochthonous to Africa's mosaic cultural contexts. The pivotal thesis is that the staurocentric model remains the triune God's instrument for triumphing over violence, and thus should be espoused by Jesus's followers in every era and context for peacebuilding in contexts of violence through a triadic constructive and critical integration of indigenous peacebuilding concepts.