A close look at environmental NGO advocacy during Brexit and how legal expertise can be a resource in moments of crisis.

This book explores the use and understanding of law and legal expertise by environmental groups. Rather than focusing on the courtroom, however, this volume scrutinizes environmental NGO advocacy during the extraordinarily dramatic Brexit process, from the referendum on leaving the EU in 2016 to the debate around the new Environment Bill in 2020. In an effort to show how legal expertise is more than a campaign tool or the threat of litigation, this book describes the ways in which law can provide distinctive ways of both seeing and changing the world. Legal resources in the environmental sector are not just a practical limit on what can be done, but an opportunity to investigate the very understanding of what should be done. Legal expertise was heavily and often effectively used in the anomalously law-heavy Brexit-environment debate. This book will clarify this moment and the NGO collaboration that made it possible for environmental advocates to call upon legal expertise in a moment of crisis.
 

Insight into planning law and its place within broader institutional and legal frameworks.

Planning is at the heart of the response to many of the significant challenges of our time, from the climate and environmental crises to social and economic inequalities. It is embedded in, as well as partially constituting, our democratic systems, so that the challenges of democratic decision-making in a complex society cannot be avoided when thinking about planning. Planning law raises some of the most fundamental questions faced by legal scholars, from the legitimacy of authority to the relationship between public and private rights and interests. And yet, planning law has been relatively neglected by legal scholars. This book helps rectify that by showcasing planning law scholarship in all of its variety and complexity. The chapters reflect this by covering a range of the objects of planning (from housing to energy to highways) and a multiplicity of planning tasks and tools (from compulsory purchase to contracting to planning inquiries).