Abstract
Sustainability, as a concept, is recognised as consisting of various complex but familiar elements. One would expect to find such elements in legislation purporting to adopt sustainability as its orientating goal. This is arguably so with the EU’s 2009 Directive that aims to achieve the sustainable use of pesticides (the Sustainable Use Directive). Legislation governing pesticide use built on the principles of sustainability could provide a powerful and sophisticated framework through which to consider, and respond to, the multiplicity of concerns pesticide use raises. This article examines sustainability in terms of its potential to regulate pesticide use. It articulates various elements of sustainability that one might expect to find in legislation designed to achieve sustainable pesticide use. It assesses the Sustainable Use Directive against the elements identified and argues that the Directive implements a narrow agenda of risk management rather than genuinely and ambitiously adopting the true principles of sustainability.
Highlights
Several decades of scholarship and policy have populated the concept of sustainability with various, familiar, elements
In 2009, the EU introduced a new Directive designed to achieve the sustainable use of pesticides.[1]
This article considers how successfully the SUD incorporates elements of sustainability and uses them to address the complexities of pesticide use, and how successfully it meets expectations associated with sustainability
Summary
Several decades of scholarship and policy have populated the concept of sustainability with various, familiar, elements. This article considers how successfully the SUD incorporates elements of sustainability and uses them to address the complexities of pesticide use, and how successfully it meets expectations associated with sustainability This discussion aims to contribute to the larger discourse around risk assessment, the environment and decision-making in the regulation of risky technologies.[2] In this context, a wholesale adoption of ‘sustainability’ as a framework on which to hang European regulation of pesticides could provide a real spur for ambitiously opening up decision-making to a broad range of issues and contributions from a variety of sources. The SUD, I argue, contains a reductive and unimaginative approach to the implementation of sustainable use, which ignores the richness and ambition of the discourse on sustainability and its well-established elements This potential, I argue further, is overlooked in favour of an approach primarily aimed at managing risk to ensure safety and environmental protection. European Pesticides Regulation 407 regulation of environmentally risky technologies and leaves little space for other matters associated with pesticide use to exert influence
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