Transnational environmental law, 2024, Vol. 13, No. 2, pp. 428-452Reflexive environmental law (REL) enables an understanding of how law builds potential for private company reflexivity. Reflexivity helps to avoid lock-in, and enhances learning and self-organization to resolve complex sustainability challenges. Thus far, REL theory has excluded traditional command-and-control regulation as a form of REL. This limits the potential of REL to understand how legislation can drive reflexivity and create more effective governance. Our framework expands the definition of REL and sets out six types of regulatory instrument found in legislation that may, or may not, constitute forms of REL. The framework comprises three reflexive drivers – autonomy, accountability, and adjustability – and, under these, eleven REL techniques. Through examples taken from European environmental legislation, we explain the drivers’ relationship with different regulatory instruments. This taxonomy empowers regulators and scholars to understand both the reflexive potential of regulatory instruments and the possibility to make instruments more reflexive in specific contexts.
The Brief explores pathways to promote a sustainable agricultural trade regime for the EU. We identify three challenges and propose three potential paths forward. We discuss potential implications of the [...]
The rewable energy resources within EU27 are highly dominated by wind and solar energy delivering electricity as output. As electrification is the most efficient way to deliver the energy services [...]
Manufacturing firms in the EU face the double challenge of decarbonisation and (international) competitive pressure. Based on the key findings of the 2024 EIB investment survey and considering the economic [...]
Regulation 1370/2007, as amended by the Fourth Railway Package, set the date of 25 December 2023 for the opening to competition of services subject to public service obligations. As opposed [...]
This policy brief contends that a new approach to Long Term Contracts (LTCs) in European competition policy based on new facts, new realities and a revised reasoning must be urgently [...]
In the North Seas region, a coalition of 9 countries expressed the ambition to quadruple their offshore wind capacity from 30 GW to 120 GW by 2030, and to then [...]
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