The “transnational” dimension of EU environmental legislation and its operationalization at the national level

Environmental problems are inherently transnational, as they transcend national borders and require regulatory solutions which equally transcend national legal systems.

For this reason, scholars have increasingly used the theoretical lens of “transnational law” to understand the complexities of environmental governance and provide solutions to tackle environmental issues. From this perspective, “transnational law” refers to alternative modes of governance which are portrayed as alternatives to “hard law”and acknowledge the multilevel and multi-actor nature of the necessary regulatory responses.

Starting from the insights offered by the “transnational environmental law” scholarship, the workshop adopts a more limited definition of the notion of transnationality, following the line of enquiry offered by the emerging field of “transnational administrative law”. The latter aims at identifying situations of administrative actions which have either (legal or factual) effects on the territory of a system different from the one from which the action originates, or are based on factual or legal elements of “foreign” origin.

The focus of the workshop is on cases in which EU environmental legislation generates situations which, in the definition provided in the paragraph above, are transnational in nature. The workshop will have the two-fold aim to, first, identify transnational situations in the main legal acts constituting the EU environmental acquis and, second, to examine, through selected case studies, how the EU-induced administrative transnationality in the field of environmental law plays out in practice. 

The contributions to the workshop will, first, identify such kind of transnational situations in the fields of:  1. air quality, 2. water, 3. noise, 4. waste, 5. biodiversity, 6. soil, 7. marine environment, 8. industrial emissions, 9. environmental impact assessment, 10. major accident hazards (Seveso).

The analysis will subsequently extend to an examination of one or more cases of transnationality in practice (tackling questions such as: how are the results of the consultation taking place in one legal system incorporated in the decision-making of another legal system? How does the duty to give reasons play out in these situations? What is the legal nature of acts that are jointly drafted by authorities belonging to more than one legal system? What is the legal nature of the information shared in the course of the decision-making process? How are informal exchanges incorporated in the decision-making process? How are procedural principles of decision-making and the right to an effective remedy applied in situations in which part of the decision-making process takes place under the authority of a legal system different from that where the final decision is adopted?).