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Sustainable Development Law in (Only) One World: Challenges and Perspectives for Governance and Governments

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Sustainability and Law

Abstract

This chapter starts from the angle of the necessity of an absolute reduction of the Global North’s use of Earth’s sink and source capacities due to the unchangeable biophysical limitations and assesses the instruments therefore available to different types of stakeholders. In terms of methodology, this subchapter applies in a hermeneutic manner the decision support framework of 3-D Sustainability, the analytical differentiation among stakeholders as the “players of the game” and institutions as the “rules of the game” and adds to these rule-focused instruments two further types of instruments, namely economic-incentive focused and information focused ones. The findings start with a distinction between substantial inter-national and intra-national finetuning when it comes to the implementation of this absolute reduction goal in the Global North and provides justifications therefore. Then, in a rough overview, the general availability of the three instrument types to three overall types of stakeholders – namely (1) governmental ones, (2) for-profit ones and (3) not-for-profit ones is presented and discussed. For the further analysis, governmental stakeholders are picked out due to their unique availability of rule-focused instruments. Then, the different extent of availability of these instruments to governmental stakeholders on three levels (national, regional and international) of the geopolitical scale is shown and analyzed. Afterwards, national stakeholders are selected for the further analysis due to their unique availability of those rule-focused instruments that allow raising taxes as own income source. In relation to all three types of instruments discussed, concrete national actions are presented that implement absolute reductions based on four of the six 3-D Sustainability criteria, namely sufficiency, eco-effectiveness, ecological equity and socio-effectiveness. Conclusions further emphasize the global relevance of the findings and point out potential future research directions.

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Mauerhofer, V. (2020). Sustainable Development Law in (Only) One World: Challenges and Perspectives for Governance and Governments. In: Mauerhofer, V., Rupo, D., Tarquinio, L. (eds) Sustainability and Law. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-42630-9_2

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