Designing Law for Sustainability

The present chapter addresses the issue of how to design law for sustainability. To this end, it firstly explores the historical and theoretical roots of sustainability, in order to show its original meaning. It highlights its ecological core and then looks at the evolution of the concept of sustainability to show how its ecological core has been gradually forgotten and almost lost over time. It observes how this may be related to the progressive conflation of sustainability with the concept of sustainable development and argues how to promote and reinstate a correct understanding of the two concepts. Then, the focus shifts on the role that sustainability might play in the realm of regulation. To this respect, it tries to determine whether and why a regulatory system for sustainability is needed and shows that only by embracing the preservation of the health and integrity of ecosystems as a priority objective it will be possible to put in place a regulatory regime truly inspired by sustainability. Finally, the question of how to design a regulatory system for sustainability is addressed. In this final part, some fundamental changes are proposed, grouped under the following five headings: beyond reductionism; beyond anthropocentrism; beyond positivism; beyond short-termism; beyond deregulation.