World Justice Project Report: "Environmental Governance Indicators for Latin America and the Caribbean"

 

Countries covered in "Environmental Governance Indicators for Latin America and the Caribbean"

 The Environmental Governance Indicators for Latin America and the Caribbean© represent the first-ever cross-country assessment of how environmental governance functions in practice. This quantitative assessment tool measures the state of environmental governance in 10 countries in the region: Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Colombia, Costa Rica, the Dominican Republic, El Salvador, Jamaica, Peru, and Uruguay.

Read the full report in English, Spanish, or Portuguese.

Join the authors November 10 for a report launch webinar event co-hosted by the World Justice Project and the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB).

 

 

 

 

According to the Web site Press Release:

Add caption

A healthy environment is critical to public health, ecosystem vitality, and the sustainability of societies. A majority of countries have endorsed this view and adopted environmental laws or included the right to a healthy environment in their constitutions. However, practice often lags behind the adoption of environmental laws, and to date, there have been very little data to help understand and address this gap. The Environmental Governance Indicators for Latin America and the Caribbean© (EGI) represent the first-ever effort to address this challenge by measuring how environmental governance functions in practice across 10 countries in the region. This study is the result of a collaborative research effort undertaken by the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) and the World Justice Project (WJP).

The EGI provides new data on 11 primary indicators of environmental governance for each country: 1) Regulation and Enforcement; 2) Civic Engagement; 3) Fundamental Environmental and Social Rights; 4) Access to and Quality of Justice; 5) Air Quality and Climate; 6) Water Quality and Resources; 7) Biodiversity; 8) Forestry; 9) Oceans, Seas, and Marine Resources; 10) Waste Management; and 11) Extraction and Mining.

The EGI features key regional trends and insights on environmental governance, as well as detailed profiles for each country. The data presented in the report are derived from an Environmental Qualified Respondents' Questionnaire (EQRQ) completed by more than 500 in-country lawyers, academics, non-governmental organizations, and management consultants with expertise in environmental issues. In addition, the EGI features indicators from third-party data sources to provide a more complete contextual picture of each country’s environmental governance.

The analysis was carefully done. Its conclusions bear some thought. Beyond the conclusions, which are helpful, it is to an interrogation of the indicators chosen, and the way they were embedded within the selected analytics that bears some scrutiny.  What pops out, though, is the continued focus on the state as the center of a regulatory structure which in its practical dimensions tends to spill out across borders.  Having (re)invested in the state, and in domestic legal ordering guided by vanguard leading force international norms, it comes as no surprise that most Latin American states face sometimes enormous challenges respecting implementation, issues of capacity, and  the structures for the protection of forces that are sometimes seen as subversive bit which function effectively as a check on unconstrained power.  Missing in all of this is the role, including the leading role, of global production and the enterprises which oversees it.  As a study of the state of the UNGP 1st Pillar duty, the study adds a crucial amount of knowledge.  As a means of bridging through to the 2nd Pillar perhaps less so. Lastly, it is a pity that Cuba is missing from the study  One understands why, but its inclusion would have added some perspective both on the data and its assumptions.