Achieving Biodiversity Protection in Megadiverse Countries
A Comparative Assessment of Australia and Brazil
Paul Martin, Márcia Dieguez Leuzinger, Solange Teles da Silva, Gabriel Leuzinger Coutinho, Paul Martin, Márcia Dieguez Leuzinger, Solange Teles da Silva, Gabriel Leuzinger Coutinho
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Achieving Biodiversity Protection in Megadiverse Countries
A Comparative Assessment of Australia and Brazil
Paul Martin, Márcia Dieguez Leuzinger, Solange Teles da Silva, Gabriel Leuzinger Coutinho, Paul Martin, Márcia Dieguez Leuzinger, Solange Teles da Silva, Gabriel Leuzinger Coutinho
Información del libro
This volume systematically analyses why legal doctrines for the protection of biodiversity are not sufficiently effective. It examples implementation in Australia and Brazil, two megadiverse countries with very differing legal and cultural traditions and natural environments.
Substantial effort goes into the development and interpretation of legal doctrines for the protection of biodiversity in national and international law. Despite this, biodiversity continues in steep decline. Nowhere is this more evident than in megadiverse countries, such as Australia and Brazil, which possess the greatest number and diversity of animals and plants on Earth. The book covers a wide range of topics, including farming, mining, marine environments, indigenous interests and governance. Achieving Biodiversity Protection in Megadiverse Countries highlights specific causes of underperformance in protecting diverse terrestrial and marine environments. It provides proposals for more effective implementation in these two jurisdictions, relevant to other megadiverse territories, and for biodiversity protection generally. Each chapter was written by teams of Australian and Brazilian authors, so that similar issues are considered across both jurisdictions, to provide both country-specific and generalisable insights.
Achieving Biodiversity Protection in Megadiverse Countries will be of great interest to students and scholars of environmental law and governance and biodiversity conservation, as well as policymakers, practitioners and NGOs working in these fields.
Preguntas frecuentes
Información
1 The issues, methods and evidence
Introduction
Legal governance of the environment involves many instruments, often reflecting apparently competing social purposes such as seeking to protect the environment at the same time as producing wealth from natural resources. The resulting complexity reflects the diversity of modern society, but it frustrates simple deductive analysis. An additional consideration is that effectiveness is multi-dimensional, involving considerations such as the receptiveness of society, the economic capacity of communities and governments, and the dynamics of power. Proving causal links between a law and an outcome is sometimes impossible and always complicated. Best practice evaluation aims to rely only on objective facts, rather than subjective information. However legal aspects of governance do involve subjective values. Concepts like justice and fairness cannot be ignored because of analytic difficulties, and legitimate differences in views, or political realities, should not be trivialised. For many performance variables, objective data is not available, or it is costly and difficult to obtain.
[T]o develop, using an inclusive and collaborative process, methods to measure whether environmental and natural resources law as implemented is supporting progress toward the IUCN vision of ‘a just world that values and conserves nature’. Objective evaluation of the performance of environmental law must be at the heart of any credible process for systematic improvement in the effectiveness of governance. Whilst best practice evaluation aims at measurement of verifiable facts to the maximum degree possible, governance (and in particular the legal aspects of governance) involves many subjective values. Even apparently objective facts will reflect subjective choices and power relationships. Many aspects of legal governance, and therefore the evaluation of governance, are contestable. This is why systematic evaluation of the legal aspects of governance is likely to require new methods and new data, and it may involve challenges to established beliefs about the role and effectiveness of legal institutions.
- Faithful translation of broad principles from international environmental conventions into clear and feasible laws within a jurisdiction is not certain. Governments can be selective in what they adopt into local policy and law, and reinterpret principles for political and administrative purposes. This can undermine implementation. The report suggested that successful implementation would be more likely if, at the design stage, the tangible purpose and operation of a norm, and how it should be implemented through the law, was specified.
- How implementation instruments and arrangements fit with domestic socio-economic and institutional contexts is important to effectiveness. The six investigations identified jurisdiction-specific issues about institutions, culture and feasibility that limited effectiveness. The evaluation suggested the need for three forms of alignment: fit with the biophysical context; with the social-economic, political and cultural context; and with the total system of natural resource governance in the jurisdiction.
- The feasibility of implementation may be a problem for implementing agencies and for citizens or organisations who are the objects of governance. Regardless of rules or incentives, if an actor does not have the resources to do what is required, effective action cannot happen. The authors highlight that economic issues are fundamental, confirming that the weight of resources for or against environmental values will substantially shape governance outcomes. The evaluations indicate that environmental instruments should aim to ‘tilt’ economic and social resources towards supporting sustainability. They also suggest that more attention needs to be paid to fiscal and other resourcing issues in implementation of legal governance (Martin, Boer, and Slobodian 2016, pp. 117–118).
- Arrangements to ensure the integrity of implementation by government agencies are critical to ensure disciplined and effective implementation. This includes systems to monitor agency compliance with administrative and substantive provisions and safeguards against ‘agency capture’ by powerful interests. In none of the jurisdictions examined was there a sufficiently strong independent body exercising effective oversight of implementation.
[N]orms for protecting and restoring the environment compete with norms that encourage its exploitation. This highlights the need to focus on the balance between harm-doing and protection in legal arrangements for natural resource governance, rather than focusing only the protective aspects of governance. Governance instruments (whether legal or otherwise) are essential but are only part of what is needed. They will not work well if conditions are hostile, or if implementation resources are not available to those responsible for implementation or people ‘at the front line’. This suggests the need for more attention to economic and political feasibility issues, affect...
Índice
- Cover
- Half Title
- Series Page
- Title Page
- Copyright Page
- Table of Contents
- List of figures
- List of tables
- List of contributors
- Foreword
- Preface
- List of acronyms and abbreviations
- 1 The issues, methods and evidence
- 2 Controlling the biodiversity impacts of agriculture
- 3 Biodiversity risk management in mining
- 4 Creating and managing marine protected areas
- 5 Social justice and the management of protected areas
- 6 Low impact recreational use and biodiversity protection
- 7 Partnered governance of biodiversity
- 8 Biodiversity intelligence from satellites
- 9 The challenge of using drones
- 10 Funding biodiversity conservation
- 11 Governing the governance system
- 12 Strategies to improve outcomes
- Appendix A: legislation list
- Appendix B: international material
- Appendix C: cases
- Index