Emmanuella Doussis, “Does International Environmental Law Matter in Sustainable Development?”, (2017) 28 YB Intl Env L 3.
Despite the improvement and growing number of international environmental agreements, we still know very little of their actual contribution to sustainable development. […] This article is an initial reflection on these issues. The main purpose is to examine why it is important to integrate the effectiveness of international environmental agreements in assessing sustainable development and to explore how this could be eventually achieved. It argues that legal indicators—that is, quantitative measures of the performance of legal systems—may serve as operational tools to assess progress or regression of international environmental law. It first focuses on some general remarks on the significance of international environmental agreements for sustainable development. It then goes on to consider legal indicators as eventual tools for assessing the performance of international environmental agreements in the implementation of the SDGs; it explores the methodological challenges and their limitations. It concludes with some general remarks on future research paths.
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