EU Environmental Law: Challenges, Change and Decision-Making

Contemporary environmental regulation is having to adapt to significant challenges. These challenges come from all directions, including the quest for economic efficiency, popular mistrust of experts and frequent observation of poor practical results. At EU level, criticisms of regulatory activity are accentuated by the significant questions that surround the legitimacy of certain EU institutions and processes.

Although it is not suggested that innovation and evolution in EU environmental law are in every case a conscious response to explicit challenges to regulatory authority, this book, examining a range of substantive EU environmental law and policy, considers far-reaching endeavours to improve environmental regulation. One striking feature of contemporary EU environmental law is its wholehearted preoccupation with the structure of decision-making. This development, and some of the serious tensions that arise in the legal conditions for decision-making, forms a major theme of this book.