This panel addresses international and European governance of environmental obligations (legal, regulatory, normative) against the background of polarized societies and a polarized world. It addresses this topic through different mechanisms that exist to resolve environmental conflicts and tackle non-implementation of obligations. Such mechanisms range from 'soft governance' to enforcable, legally binding decisions. They include, but are not limited to, judicial proceedings and legal judgments by international courts and tribunals, more cooperative or managerial non-compliance mechanisms (NCMs), and other ways of dealing with environmental obligations and resolving implementation issues as part of international treaties, supranational law, and multilateral environmental agreements (MEAs).
This panel focuses on the closely linked issues of implementation and environmental justice. Strengthening the mechanisms to resolve global environmental conflicts, facilitate implementation, but also addressing broader questions of effectiveness and justice of environmental obligations on issues such as climate change, biodiversity, hazardous waste, water resource management, and protection of the marine environment is essential for addressing environmental challenges in a polarized world. However, repeated regulatory and legal attacks, but also acts of undermining legitimacy regarding multilateral forms of cooperation by autocratic and populist governments or other actors in polarized societies are hampering the effectiveness of these mechanisms and thereby preventing environmentally just regulation.
Little is known about the connection between the legal mechanisms and political issues of implementation and conflict resolution, and how this affects environmental justice, understood here as the fair treatment and meaningful involvement of people in the implementation of environmental regulation. The panel seeks to bring together these themes inviting political scientists, legal scholars, and researchers from adjacent fields to address the topic from conceptual, empirical, and normative perspectives. At the same time, it is open to a diverse variety of theoretical approaches, methodologies, and empirical approaches.