On the relationship between constitutional environmental human rights and sustainable development outcomes

Abstract

Since the late 1900s, 84 national constitutions have been written anew or amended to include substantive environmental human rights provisions. The nascent statistical research exploring the relationship between these rights and environmental outcomes is limited to a few studies which generally show a positive correlation between the two. Under certain conditions and controlling for confounding factors, having one of these provisions is positively correlated with improved environmental outcomes. The existing research, however, does not effectively exploit the characteristics of the underlying countries while accounting for how said countries respond to the treatment of having a new provision. This paper expands the current research framework by using a heterogeneous treatment effects (HTE) model to exploit the country-level characteristics and the treatment effect of having a substantive environmental human rights provision. The statistical analyses use the newly developed Sustainable Development Index (SDI) as the outcome variable and panel regression results demonstrate a positive correlation between SDI and having a substantive environmental human rights provision. The results of the HTE model demonstrate that SDI is positively impacted by the treatment of having a substantive environmental human rights provision but in a generally constant way and only over a range of propensity scores.