Track 7e
Legal aspects of Sustainability
Track chair
Volker MAUERHOFER, University of Vienna, Austria
Goals and objectives of the track
Legal aspects of Sustainability deal with the challenge to appropriately define, implement and enforce the scale of the human- and non-human use of resources, the distribution of these resources to different users and their allocation to different products. The rule of law is an instrument that exclusively is available to public authorities while it interrelates with all other available instruments whether applied by public or private actors. This interrelation can led in terms of sustainability to absolute improvements durably stopping or even turning around a negative development. While in other situations just relative improvements may be achieved in the mid- or long term. Law has also sometimes limitations, e.g. due to its introduction on various geographical lev-els. And it has its restrictions as envisaged changes are often better addressed by other instruments or a com-bined approach.
The goal of this track is to discuss key concepts, methods and applications of legal aspects of Sustainability and lessons learned. We will further map opportunities of and challenges for legal aspects in a sustainable devel-opment in various thematic and strategic subjects, thereby contributing to the development of these domains scientifically and practically.
Legal aspects of Sustainability
Contributions from the followings areas are sought-after are e.g.
- Legal aspects of Environmental, Social and/or Economic Sustainability and their interplay
- Legal instruments and their interplay with environmental/social/economic capital in terms of stocks/sources
- Legal instruments and their interplay with environmental /social/economic capacity in terms of flows
- Legal instruments in order to sustain planetary boundaries/ecological integrity/social and environmental carrying capacity also with the back ground of population questions
- The interplay on legal and other instruments in multilevel governance regimes addressing sustainability
- Innovative local, national, regional & international legal principles/approaches/assessments towards more sustainability incl. e.g. degrowth law, green economy law, public participation, soft law & customary law
- The role of sustainability law for institutional change and government policy also towards future genera-tions
- Legislative, administrative, judicial decision-making & enforcement by law in terms of priority setting, igno-rance, uncertainty, risk, conflicts of interest and trade-offs; absolute and relative achievements by law
- The role of law for property rights, new commons, the Post2015 Agenda & Sustainable Development Goals
Contact: volker.mauerhofer@gmx.at
You may submit your abstract by visiting the Ex Ordo abstract submission system (you will be required to setup an account first): http://isdrs2015.exordo.com/
