Challenges for a sustainable environmental law 2.0 – Administrative action and governance in times of multiple crises

The project examines how environmental law can remain effective in the face of multiple ecological crises, political polarisation and increasing attacks on democratic governance models. The starting point is the observation that the crisis in environmental law is not primarily attributable to a lack of scientific evidence or insufficient normative justification. Rather, key environmental protection and participation instruments – such as environmental impact assessments and class actions – come under pressure precisely at the moment when their protective and legitimising functions are most needed. Under buzzwords such as ‘red tape reduction’ and ‘accelerated planning’, they are increasingly framed as obstacles to economic dynamism, the state’s capacity to act, or social acceptability.

The project therefore asks why, despite established diagnoses of crises relating to climate, biodiversity, resources and pollution, we are seeing rollbacks, blockages and crises of legitimacy rather than a strengthening of environmental protection regimes. Environmental law is understood not merely as an instrument of ecological governance, but as a contentious project of social order whose actual validity depends on factors such as recognition, legitimacy and enforceability. The project thus focuses on the social conditions of environmental governance: Which criticisms levelled at environmental law – such as expertocracy, over-regulation, social injustice, or technocratic overreach – point to real tensions, blind spots or communication deficits within environmental legal regimes? Methodologically, the project combines legal analysis with a perspective informed by the sociology of law and social theory. Social science diagnoses of crises concerning authoritarian rollbacks, polarisation, the erosion of liberal-democratic consensus and the loss of acceptance of environmental regulation are translated into categories relevant to environmental law. Building on this, the project identifies ‘pressure points’ in environmental law, particularly in administrative law and administrative practice: deficits in information and understanding, problems of legitimacy, conflicting conceptions of freedom and justice, and tensions between acceleration, participation, precaution and effectiveness.

The aim is a progressive recalibration of environmental law that strengthens protective and regulatory effects not in spite of, but through legitimacy, mediation, democratic embedding and administrative practicability. The project develops starting points for legal and administrative arrangements that make environmental regulation viable even under conditions of deep social dissent. In this way, the project contributes to an environmental law appropriate to the Anthropocene, which reconciles its normative ambition with the real conditions of its social recognition and administrative enforcement.

A central research question to be developed will be examined from three different perspectives in three expert reports to be commissioned. The reports will be presented and discussed at a conference.