Governance and environmental change

The untapped capacity of existing laws could provide a viable method for addressing accelerating environmental change in the absence of major legal reform, a study suggests. Full-scale legal change, on national and international levels, is a slow process, even as environmental alterations due to climate change accelerate. Ahjond Garmestani, Robin Craig, J.B. Ruhl, and colleagues identified examples of untapped capacities in the existing laws of the United States and the European Union. The authors note that similar to a social-ecological system, environmental law has adaptive and transformative capacities. Existing laws may have provisions that allow for creating new standards as conditions change, such as the United States' Magnuson-Stevens Fishery Conservation and Management Act, which allows fishery management to adjust catch allowances. The authors note that the transformative capacity of law stems from the flexibility of the terms of the law itself and procedural discretion. Additionally, the authors note that legal capacities can be leveraged to respond to environmental changes and the complex challenges of scaling implementation across multiple levels of government and across agencies while still remaining within the bounds of law. According to the authors, innovative cooperation between government and nongovernment entities is necessary to help governance keep up with environmental change.

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Article #19-06247: "Untapped capacity for resilience in environmental law," by Ahjond Garmestani et al.

MEDIA CONTACT: Robin Kundis Craig, University of Utah, Salt Lake City, UT; e-mail: robin.craig@law.utah.edu; J.B. Ruhl, Vanderbilt University Law School, Nashville, TN; e-mail: jb.ruhl@vanderbilt.edu