Law and Sustainability

This course will introduce students to the legal aspects of the challenges of sustainable development and transition, in their ecological, economic and social justice dimensions. The aim is to enable students to learn about the role of law in global change and the need to create the conditions for the long-term satisfaction of the needs of current and future generations.

With this in mind, the course aims to offer a critical and decompartmentalised approach to the law, to provide an overview of its role in anchoring the man-nature duality, in the emergence of the concept of sustainable development and in the understanding at international and domestic level of the major themes of transition (energy-climate, food-agriculture, the fight against poverty and inequality, resources, mobility, territories and cities, etc.). The link with fundamental rights and the concepts of environmental and climate justice is also presented. The aim is not to go into detail on these themes, but to show how they are interconnected and to offer a 360° overview from a global and critical perspective. 

The course is a direct extension of the MOOC "Enjeux du développement durable et de la transition" (BIRE2050) offered at UCLouvain, which provides the non-legal foundations of the issue. The proposed course is complementary to several specialised courses on related themes, given as an option or as part of the in-depth minor (general environmental law, town planning law, law and gender, financial market regulations, law and migration, international protection of human rights, law of representative and participatory democracy, etc.) as well as cross-disciplinary courses including the Law of Public Policy course and the Law, Change and Society course, which offers a theoretical and thematic complement on the role of law in society.

Through these developments, the course invites students to take a critical look at the role of the law in the current ecological crisis and in the solutions being found to it, and to understand the importance of an inter- and trans-disciplinary approach to the challenges of sustainable development.