Environmental Law Enforcement Alliances in Middle Income Countries
Law and Development of Middle Income Countries, edited by Tom Ginsburg and R.P. Peerenboom. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014, Forthcoming
39 Pages Posted: 15 Dec 2013 Last revised: 18 Mar 2014
Date Written: December 12, 2013
Abstract
This paper studies environmental enforcement innovations in China, Brazil, Mexico and Indonesia. It shows how in each of the five cases studied, the original enforcement authority was expanded as the enforcement authorities forged alliances with other private and public actors. The alliances have had different levels of success and offer hope that a broader approach to law enforcement in which administrative agencies are not replaced but rather made part of an alliance supporting the enforcement of environmental law may work well to overcome structural obstacles to environmental enforcement in MICs. The paper analyses both under what conditions alliances emerged, as well as their limits in the different socio-economic and political contexts of the MICs studied here. Finally, the paper analyses alliances in MICs and HICs comparatively finding that although the type of alliance may be similar, its goals and context of operation are not. This has important implications for the transfer of HIC ideas about new regulation, such as responsive regulation, co-regulation, or beyond compliance regulation, which were developed to deal with HIC problems and require adaptation in MICs.
Keywords: environmental law, law and development, law enforcement, comparative law
JEL Classification: K32, K42
Suggested Citation: Suggested Citation