Affiliations: [a] Harold Samuel Professor of Law and Environmental Policy, University of Cambridge, UK; Founder and former Director of the Cambridge Centre for Environment, Energy and Natural Resources Governance (C-EENRG); Principal Investigator (Cambridge) and State 1 co-lead of the BEIS-CIFF-funded EEIST Project | [b] Senior Lecturer in Global Systems, Global Systems Institute, University of Exeter, UK; Fellow, Cambridge Centre for Environment, Energy and Natural Resources Governance (C-EENRG); Principal Investigator and Scientific Director of the BEIS-CIFF-funded EEIST Project
Abstract: This article provides a diagnostic of a major structural problem of environmental law before suggesting a way to address it. The problem is that environmental law, even avant la lettre, was and remains designed as a law of negative externalities: a body of laws fundamentally organized so as to minimize interference with the underlying transaction while mitigating its negative externalities. This article proposes instead to reframe environmental law not as the expression of allocative efficiency but as a means of steering socio-economic processes in directions that are more likely to avoid an irreversible change in Earth System dynamics.
Keywords: Complexity economics, transformational change, fundamental uncertainty, risk-opportunity analysis, environmental law as a technology, Anthropocene
