The Project
We research how Law and Degrowth interplay, especially for energy and minerals in Europe.
OF OUT 9 PLANETARY LIMITS EXCEEDED
policy proposals already exist to implement Degrowth
Extensive research shows that six of the nine identified planetary boundaries have already been crossed. These boundaries include climate change, the biodiversity extinction, microplastics pollution, ocean acidification, and more.
For Earth to once again become a safe operating space for humanity, it is urgent to turn to a degrowth economy.
EU COUNTRIES AND THE EU LEGISLATION BEING ANALYZED
Degrowth means a democratically planned reduction of energy and resource use designed to bring the economy back into balance with the living world in a way that reduces inequality and improves human wellbeing.
In other words, it’s about living well, within the limits offered by our planet, which implies the physical impossibility of perpetual economic growth.
Although the idea of degrowth dates back to the 1970s, its development in scholarly work significantly gained traction during the 2010s, especially insofar as it was embedded in ecological economics discourse.
This research has led to the development of 530 policy proposals, concerning all aspects of the human experience. Yet, degrowth as a research topic for legal scholars is barely nascent.
The DELaw project aims to find ways to integrate the principles of degrowth into the law, in order to reorientate our society at the required scale and pace. To do so, DELaw undertakes an ambitious comparative interdisciplinary analysis of EU and 8 Member States’ energy laws, with a focus on the legal regime for energy storage and especially batteries. Indeed, batteries are at the crossroads between two of the most pressing environmental threats.
They are needed to allow higher levels of renewable energy sources and fight climate change, but they rely on critical raw materials such as nickel, cobalt, lithium or copper, the mining of which contributes to biodiversity loss and wreaks havoc on local communities.
DELaw uses a solid mix of legal research methods: doctrinal legal method, interdisciplinary legal method, comparative legal method, constitutional energy law method, and all this framed within a “critical stance” inspired from critical legal studies.
These methods are used during the three successive and iterative work packages of DELaw, organised as shown below.
DELaw will generate two high quality, ground-breaking results for legal research and for society as a whole.
Firstly, the team will create a new methodological framework for the inclusion of degrowth principles into the law, tested with the regulation of batteries in the EU but applicable to other legal fields and jurisdictions. This way, it will facilitate the work of other researchers aiming to unearth the facilitators and barriers towards integrating degrowth in any legal field and EU country.
Secondly, DELaw will propose a set of recommendations for when lawmakers both at EU and national levels will look at adopting degrowth-focused legal amendments, a moment that draws closer as time passes and the environmental situation worsens.