Global Environmental Law at a Crossroads

Building Bridges Across Jurisdictional and Disciplinary Boundries: The Need for New Environmental Law Research Methods

Room 107

In the past forty years the global population has doubled and global CO2 emissions have increased by 70%. Human induced change to ecosystems is more rapid and extensive than any comparable period in history. Current biodiversity loss exceeds that of the historical past by several orders of magnitude and shows no indication of slowing. Anthropogenic changes to ecosystems have contributed to improvements to human well-being and economic development. This has been achieved at growing costs in the form of the degradation of many ecosystem services. Population growth and economic development have intensified competition over natural resources worldwide.

Rapid increases in globalization since the first Rio Conference in 1992 has exceeded the ability of global governance systems to respond to the resulting sustainability challenges. The need for integrated interdisciplinary approaches to address these challenges is widely accepted. There are however a lack of methods to address such approaches. In this context, traditional doctrinal approaches to legal scholarship are clearly inadequate.

There is growing recognition that the design of effective legal instruments requires research methods that go beyond traditional approaches and include social and institutional considerations. This recognition has led to socio-legal approaches to legal research and the use of empirical research methods. The design of environmental law instruments faces challenges in addition to those found in other areas of law. These challenges include the meaningful incorporation of ecological knowledge into decision-making and addressing issues that span jurisdictional boundaries from the global to the local. In this presentation, I discuss the methods used in a research project aimed at developing strategies for the effective management of transboundary natural resources. I use this research to explore the particular methodological challenges that face environmental law research and provide directions for the further development of environmental law scholarship.

The research used an iterative process which combined desk-based legal-doctrinal research, case-studies and comparative legal research. Two transboundary projects were used as case studies. The first case-study was located in the Pamir-Alai Mountains of Central Asia and involved the adjacent former Soviet nations of Tajikistan and the Kyrgyz Republic. The second case study was based in the highlands of Borneo and included the island’s three countries: Brunei, Indonesia and Malaysia. A comparative study of the legal and institutional requirements for transboundary biodiversity conservation and transboundary water management was conducted to identify core principles for the governance of transboundary resources.

This research highlights the transferability of legal methods for the management of natural resources. It also highlights that the creation of effective environmental law instruments requires additional methods to incorporate essential science-policy linkages.