Measuring the effectiveness of environmental law – Legal indicators for sustainable development

Under the direction of Michel Prieur, Christophe Bastin and with the collaboration of Mohamed Ali Mekouar

This book presents a new method for measuring the effectiveness of national and international environmental law. It is the result of four years of research and experimentation in order to develop a way to build legal indicators. The only existing indicators on the environment measure only statistical, scientific or economic data.

Thanks to legal indicators, governments, parliaments, economic and social actors and environmental NGOs will be able to assess concretely, on a scientific basis, what are the gaps, advances and regressions in the application of international conventions and national laws. The legal indicators will serve as decision-making tools, in particular to carry out reforms in full knowledge of the facts and no longer blindly.

The mathematical method used makes it possible, on the basis of a questionnaire highlighting all the legal and institutional stages of the application of legal texts, to provide data highlighting the points to be improved and the strong points of the application of the law.

This update of a first book published in 2018 by the Institut de la Francophonie pour le développement durable (IFDD) was made possible thanks to the support of the Normandy Chair of Excellence for Peace (CNRS, Normandy Region, Maison de la recherche en sciences humaines (MRSH) and the University of Caen – France). A line of research is dedicated to this theme of legal indicators and the Chair of Excellence hopes that this work will be widely distributed and accessible in open access in English, French and Spanish.