An Adaptive Framework for Resilience Justice
摘要
This chapter suggests several characteristics for a more adaptive framework within the umbrella principles and rules of public law, combining the goals of the protection of environmental rights, the implementation or enhancement of resilience justice, and community action. A new adaptive legal framework must, therefore, be based on elements of promoting public participation and consultation and decision- and law-making, encouraging the inclusion of different public entities and a multiplicity of stakeholders in the processes, providing monitoring components in the enactment and application of decisions and legislation, and also making judicial and extrajudicial decisions more flexible, adaptive, and learning-grounded. This does not mean that all other conventional and less “flexible” legal tools should be repudiated by environmental lawyers and interpreters. On the contrary, the hereby suggested tools are a supplement for a better and more effective protection and application of environmental law, in a way to improve resilience of social-ecological systems, and especially within complex, unstable, uncertain, and unequal communities and territories such as urban environments. The adaptive environmental legal framework, based on the components described in this study, intends to support the already usual and conventional tools. Conventional environmental law is often grounded in those apparently more “crystallising” hard law instruments, which have been, as a matter of fact, strongly contributing for the evolution of protection of the environment. Nevertheless, the tools and mechanisms introduced and suggested in this chapter (and also in the previous ones) are additional elements to make this protection more effective, participated, closer to the reality, and capable of accompanying the evolution of communities and territories (which are always changing) with more precision and agility.