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The Environmental Rights Revolution

A Global Study of Constitutions, Human Rights, and the Environment

David R Boyd author

Format:Paperback

Publisher:University of British Columbia Press

Published:6th Dec '11

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The Environmental Rights Revolution cover

A pioneering account of the rapid spread of the constitutional right to a healthy environment and its effect on laws, court decisions, and peoples’ everyday lives.

David Boyd shows that recognition of the right to a healthy environment is not only growing, it is having a profound influence on public policy and environmental protection.

The right to a healthy environment is the subject of extensive philosophical debates that revolve around a key question: Should rights to clean air, water, and soil be entrenched in law?

This pioneering book answers this by moving beyond theoretical debate to measure the practical effects of enshrining the right in constitutions. David Boyd analyzes 193 constitutions and the laws and court decisions of more than 100 nations in Europe, Latin America, Asia, and Africa. He reveals that nations with constitutional protections have stronger environmental laws, enhanced enforcement, greater government accountability, and better access to justice, information, and public participation in decision making than nations without such provisions. As a result, they demonstrate superior environmental performance and have smaller ecological footprints.

Boyd not only demonstrates that constitutionalizing environmental protection has the power to make sustainability a priority, he tells inspiring stories about the difference the right to a healthy environment is making in people’s lives.

What sets this book evidently apart from all the existing publications in the field is its empirical approach…in an earlier endorsement for this book’s marketing, I declared that it ‘breaks new ground in terms of approach, content, scope, and methodology and is well worth a place on the bookshelves of anyone who takes environmental rights and governance seriously’. After this recent reassessment of the book, I can only reiterate these sentiments.

-- Louis J Kotzé, Professor, North-West University, South Africa * Journal of Human Rights and the Environment, Vol. 4 No. 1 *

Boyd’s book forms an indispensable and influential addition to this literature not only due to the strength and comprehensiveness of its comparative legal analysis, but also because of the important empirical questions it seeks to answer as well as raises for future research. Indeed, by conducting the first serious and systematic empirical study of the environmental implications of the right to a healthy environment, Boyd has moved this field beyond the speculative and abstract arguments typical of earlier scholarship...Boyd’s meticulous examination of the legal status of the right to a healthy environment in close to a hundred countries provides powerful evidence of its salience to legal systemsaround the world...The Environmental Rights Revolution forms an important, pioneering effort for understanding the legal influence and broader significance of the right to a healthy environment. As a result, the variety of empirical puzzles and questions that it leaves in its wake should continue to influence research in this field for many years to come.

-- Sebastien Jodoin * McGill International Journal of Sustainable Development Law and Policy, Volume 8: Issue

ISBN: 9780774821612

Dimensions: unknown

Weight: 680g

468 pages