Abstract

This is an executive summary of a forthcoming monograph, to be published by UCL Press, uclpress.co.uk/. Environmental Groups and Legal Expertise: Shaping the Brexit Process explores the use and understanding of law and legal expertise by environmental groups. Rather than the usual focus on the court room, it scrutinises environmental NGO advocacy during the extraordinarily dramatic Brexit process, from the referendum on leaving the EU in June 2016 to the debate around the new Environment Bill in the first half of 2020. There is generally a weak understanding of both the complexity and the potential of legal expertise in the environmental NGO community. Legal expertise can be more than a tool for campaigners, and more than litigation: it provides distinctive ways of both seeing the world and changing the world. The available legal resource in the sector is not just a practical limit on what can be done, but spills into the very understanding of what should be done, and what resource is needed. Mutually reinforcing links between capacity, understanding, culture and investment affect legal expertise across the board. There are however pockets of sophisticated legal expertise in the community, and legal expertise was heavily and often effectively used in the anomalously law-heavy Brexit-environment debate. The ability to call on thinly spread legal expertise in a crisis was in part due to effective NGO collaboration around Brexit-environment.

Highlights

  • The UK environmental non-governmental organisations (NGOs) communityBrexit and the Environment BillSome theoretical backgroundNGO advocacy, influence and impact

  • Drawing on our interview data, we argue that legal expertise is thinly dispersed across the sector, partly because of the financial cost of legal expertise

  • For much of the period of our case study, certainly between the two General Elections in 2017 and 2019, political opportunity opened doors for environmental groups, and a different set of opportunities would have led to different results, in terms of what NGOs did, what they achieved, and what we find in the rest of this book

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Summary

Greener UK: influence and collaboration

Draft Environment (Principles and Governance) Bill, 19, 66, 68, 69, 109, 110, 111, 119, 127, 151, 155, 156. Clause 31, 72 European Communities Act 1972, 6, 66 Fisheries Bill, 7, 51 Marine and Coastal Access Act 2009, 7, 108 Natural Environment and Rural Communities Act 2006, 7 Trade Bill, 4, 51. Directive 92/43/EEC on the conservation of natural habitats and of wild fauna and flora [1992] OJ L 206/7 (Habitats Directive), 55, 60, 61, 111, 123 Directive 2000/60/EC establishing a framework for Community action in the field of water policy [2000] OJ L 327/1. Common Agricultural Policy Court of Justice of the European Union Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs Environmental Audit Committee Environment, Food and Rural Affairs Environmental Improvement Plan Member of Parliament Non-Governmental Organisation Office for Environmental Protection Science and Technology Studies Treaty on European Union Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union UK Environmental Law Association xvii

Acknowledgements xix
Chapter 3 Brexit and the journey to the Environment Act – interrupted
Chapter 4 Law and legal expertise
Chapter 5 Mobilising law in practice
Chapter 6 Lobbying in coalition
Chapter 7 Greener UK: influence and collaboration
Findings
Conclusions
Full Text
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