Economic Actors in EU Environmental Law

Summary:

This article acknowledges that the inclusion of economic actors in environmental governance is crucial for environmental protection; but equally that their role does raise some significant concerns, particularly in terms of accountability and legitimacy.

The article examines the efforts made in EU environmental law to respond to those concerns, and argues that EU law has developed important safeguard mechanisms to address concerns about economic actors. Those mechanisms are, however, applied in a flawed and inconsistent manner. Therefore, in this article some additional methods for mitigating the challenges posed by actors in regulation, which build on the approaches already entrenched in EU law, are explored.