Public Participation in Environmental Law: Does the Aarhus convention alongside the way it has been implemented ensure environmental justice for all?



CHAPTER II: REVIEW RELATED LITERATURE

Introduction

Something of an agreement on the significance of public engagement in ecological decision-making has been accomplished in latest years. The focus on public engagement is one of a variety of answers to certain disillusionment with the administration of the state (or the EC) to regulate for ecological defence, and is progressively echoed in worldwide, European and household ecological law. The Aarhus Convention, the Convention on Access to Information, Public Participation in Decision-making and Access to Justice in Environmental Matters, mentioned to by the UN Secretary-General as '... by far the most outstanding elaboration of standard of the Rio Declaration', is possibly the most important worldwide discovery in this area. The reason of this item is to analyse, from the viewpoint of the Aarhus Convention, means for public engagement in English ecological law. Although this locality has conventionally been somewhat shut to out-of-doors leverage, the introduction of the public into conclusion producing aligns inside a tendency in the direction of the 'proceduralisation' of ecological (and other) guideline, which has been much commented upon recently.

'Public participation' in environmental law and policy could range from the basic democratic right to vote in European, national and local elections, to possible rights to express a view, vote on or even veto a particular project. We do not propose to attempt to define public participation nor is it defined in the Convention. Broadly, however, we are concerned here with mechanisms that allow the public to evaluate, comment on or influence regulatory decisions, at a broad policy level or in respect of individual projects. We begin this paper with an analysis of some of the aims of public participation. John Dryzek examines mechanisms of public involvement (including access to information, consultation, and dispute resolution) as a particular environmental discourse, 'democratic pragmatism'. Although we will not be examining discourse analysis in this article, Dryzek's approach allows us to see participation as an alternative to more traditional autonomous bureaucracy, providing a response to actual and perceived failures of expert regulation by the public administration. Dissatisfaction with the performance of existing regulatory arrangements might question both the effectiveness and quality of decisions, and the democratic legitimacy and fairness of those decisions. A turn to increased public involvement for a solution can be compared with a market-based response to regulatory failures (for example, taxing, pricing, privatising9), which, at least as currently practised, may tend to exclude the public from decision-making. After discussing some possible rationales for public participation, we turn to the Aarhus Convention itself.

The Convention has received a generally positive response from NGOs and governments. Although it is a fairly weak legal document, given its quite vague and permissively character and the absence of adequate enforcement mechanisms, the Convention makes a potentially powerful statement on the importance of public participation in a wide range of decisions. Moreover, some of the weak international obligations under ...