Countering Short-Termism: Creating New Rights-holders to Protect Long-term Environmental Interests in Europe
Democratically elected legislatures across Europe are often hesitant to impose strict environmental protection measures as they answer to their constituencies, who traditionally favour immediate economic prosperity over long-term environmental benefits. This creates a political-legal climate dominated by short-termism. This is conducive to a system, where long-term environmental interests are routinely overridden by the gains of present stakeholders.
In the hypotheses of this research, the failures of such a decision-making paradigm could only be effectively remedied by creating new rights-holders, whose legally articulated interests can pose binding constraints for the discretion of the majority in the balancing of short-term and long-term interests. This project interrogates developments in European domestic laws and domestic caselaw to appraise the extent and ways in which the judiciary may use existing rightsholders as leverage points to counterbalance short-term interests by giving equal normative weight to their long-term rights and needs in environmental litigation. This research thus surveys emerging rights-holders in European laws and maps the normative building blocks of a new paradigm of environmental democracy, which would end the disenfranchisement of posterity.
