La transizione ecologica è in corso ovunque. Ma quali sono i fattori che ne determinano le traiettorie? L’Handbook of Energy Law in the Low-Carbon Transition punta i riflettori sull’intreccio fra dimensioni giuridiche e non giuridiche della transizione. Oltre quaranta autori provenienti da sei continenti esplorano le misure adottare per la decarbonizzazione del settore energetico, gli ostacoli più rilevanti e le ragioni che spiegano la varietà delle scelte legislative e regolatorie. Ne emerge un quadro di luci ed ombre. Gli ostacoli alla trasformazione del settore energetico sono numerosi, ma non impediscono una buona dose di innovazione giuridica. Le indicazioni principali offerte dall’Handbook riguardano: la necessità di ripensare il trasferimento di conoscenze, tecnologiche e non, fra paesi industrializzati e in via di sviluppo; vantaggi e limiti dei sistemi di governo multi-livello; pro e contro dei diversi strumenti di intervento; le strategie di pianificazione delle infrastrutture a basse emissioni; i significati della giustizia energetica. La comparazione di una varietà di contesti istituzionali conferma che le differenti traiettorie della transizione non rappresentano un limite, ma una delle caratteristiche in grado di accelerare i processi di cambiamento. Perché questo avvenga, la ricerca interdisciplinare deve offrire ai decisori pubblici le conoscenze necessarie per riconoscere i percorsi dell’innovazione giuridica disponibili in ciascuna area geografica.
Giuseppe Bellantuono is professor at the Faculty of Law, University of Trento
Lee Godden formerly was professor at the Melbourne Law School, University of Melbourne
Hanri Mostert is professor of law at the University of Cape Town
Hannah Wiseman is professor of law at PennState Law, United States
Hao Zhang is professor at the Faculty of Law at The Cinese University of Hong Khong
From the Introduction (pagg. 1-2)
Goals of the handbook
With the publishing market flooded every year by books and articles related to climate change, a new book on the low-carbon transition calls for a strong justification. When we embarked on this project a few years ago, we thought each of us knew a lot about a little. The ‘little’, in this case, is the unfolding of the low-carbon transition in the continent where each of us usually works. Our acquaintance with energy and climate law scholars from many countries tells us this is a widespread condition: we all have an in-depth knowledge of the regulatory frameworks closer to us, but only a bare understanding of the regulatory frameworks governing the low-carbon transition in other countries and regions. The problem is not the availability of information: climate policies in any place can be easily identified. The crucial issue is how to connect such information to the multiple impacts of the transition. The latter fundamentally transforms traditional legal concepts and the relationships among legal branches. It also presses legal scholars to find new ways to engage in interdisciplinary research and explore the interplay between legal and non-legal dimensions.
A better understanding of the variety of low-carbon transitions is the primary motivation behind this Handbook. Previous legal work focused on climate policies in representative regions and countries (e.g., Hunter et al., 2020; Oyewunmi et al., 2020; Roggenkamp et al. 2021; Reins and Verschuuren, 2022). We expand the reach, with authors from nineteen countries discussing the legal underpinnings of climate policies in six continents. Each chapter can be an entry point to a much larger body of literature.
Beyond providing updated information, we aim at identifying similarities, differences, and connections across regional, national and local experiences. We start from the premise that such an approach helps make sense of the transformations taking place on a scale never seen before. Furthermore, the legal dimensions analyzed in this Handbook should ease the search for the myriad links with non-legal disciplines. In the energy and climate fields, interdisciplinary dialogues are thriving, but face theoretical, practical, and institutional barriers (Sonetti and Arrobbio, in this volume). To a large extent, they are the same barriers any interdisciplinary research involving legal disciplines faces. Though, with regard to climate change, interdisciplinarity is often said to represent the only approach capable of driving the transition in the right direction. We share the view that interdisciplinarity is desperately needed, but we do not subscribe to the position that a single approach should be pursued. Methodological pluralism is better equipped to deal with different problems and the variety of contexts the transition has to face. We propose to rely on the concept of legal pathways of decarbonization to systematically present the components of the institutional contexts directly affecting the pace and direction of the low-carbon transition. We argue that this kind of legal knowledge should be drawn upon to improve the interdisciplinary understanding of decarbonization scenarios.
Courtesy by De Gruyter.