This volume, edited by Eva Julia Lohse and Birgit Peters, is the twenty-seventh volume in the Brill Nijhoff series on Legal Aspects of Sustainable Development published under my General Editorship. The aim of this series is to publish works at the cutting edge of legal scholarship that address both the practical and the theoretical aspects of this important concept.
I am very pleased to be able to include this book in the series. It is the result of an innovative collaboration between younger scholars from Argentina, Germany, Italy, Kenya, Norway and South Africa, who during the period 2018–2022 met initially at workshops in Bayreuth and Trier and latterly, during the COVID pandemic, virtually.
In the ongoing quest for sustainable development, which has found its most recent iteration in the 2015 UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), the need for public participation is commonly flagged as an essential requirement, As the Editors remind us the origins of this idea can perhaps be traced to the influential Brundtland Report of 1987 that suggested that the participation of the public affected, as well as of further stakeholders, would ensure the recognition of the common interests that sustainable development was to protect. Principle 10 of the Rio Declaration begins by emphasising that ‘Environmental issues are best handled with participation of all concerned citizens, at the relevant level …”
The overarching objective of this ambitious work, therefore, is to unpack the requirements of effective participation and to ask from a legal perspective - whether, and if so, how sustainability can be achieved through participation in the multi-level governance structures of international, supranational and national law. The resulting research questions are complex and multifaceted and as the Editors themselves again suggest the answers are indeed “neither obvious nor trivial.”
This book breaks new ground. It provides a wealth of insights and unrivalled perspectives on participation as a means to further sustainable development from a legal perspective, in the multi-level environment of international, European and national law. I am certain it will merit a warm reception.
David Freestone Washington DC