Towards sustainable law: Deriving a planning tool for legislation

Abstract

This paper outlines a legal‐ecological assessment method which can help administration and legislation to lake into account ecological criteria in the planning process of new legal instruments. It argues that sustainable development of legal instruments can be based only on a profound analysis of legislation and policy implementation and its impact on the various fields of the entity defined by ‘cultural landscape’, in other words, the human‐dominated natural environment. On the basis of the Pressure‐State‐Response model of the OECD the paper focuses on the area of societal response. As the response area remains mostly a black box in the discussion about environmental indicators, the paper sheds light onto this field and describes the determinants that have to be taken into account when it comes to the derivation of indicators from mechanisms of legislation and legal administration.