My dissertation for PGDEL
Legal Research, Law and Policy ·The idea that ecological conservation is tied inextricably to humanity’s survival is now more prevalent than ever. With the sense of urgency, one would assume, would also come a sense of abeyance to nature‟s will, of community, and of public participation. To the contrary, one can find many examples of non-conformity to the hallowed standards of Rule of Law, in as much as it binds citizens and authorities alike.
This leads one to be curious about what mechanism is put in place to deal with the question of non-compliance of laws that hold immense social value, given the context on which they operate. Is it just predicated on the moral values of people who must follow and manage these systems, or is there something larger running behind the scenes of the many-headed hydra that a system of laws may constitute? Does the system of laws that is formulated to deal with these issues have a grounding in allied fields such as economics, environmental psychology and public spheres of activism? This is the question that is sought to be researched into in Chapter 2, where some attention is also paid as to how these fields react.
In Chapter 3, the example of India as a country which implements its own compliance mechanisms, with its endemic problems towards implementation, and a large system of regulatory bodies, judicial bodies is taken and studied. Case studies from historical implementations of EIA regimes, and judiciary‟s response to the problem of implementation is gone into with a look at how effective it has all been in preventing the state of India‟s
environment from declining.
In Chapter 4, some effort is taken to categorise and describe the various kinds of implementation mechanisms that international jurists and bodies formed under different
MEAs have sought to innovate on. Since international law is a field with its own unique
diplomatic effects placing a hold on it, these limitations are recognised while studying the
negotiations that affect the formulation of compliance mechanisms. The study of this field is
gone into detail with respect to two different framework conventions.
Chapter 5 is where the author offers some concluding thoughts on what the learnings from a
multi-faceted overview such as the present study point towards.