La produzione pubblica del diritto dell’ambiente: tra expertise tecnico-scientifico, democrazia e responsabilità politica

Public production of environmental law: between technical-scientific expertise, democracy and political responsibility

Abstract

The Author moves from the assumption that science and politics constitute an inseparable pair in environmental protection field, so that the public production of environmental law consists mostly of a “technical regulation” matter; that is, legal rules are developed on the basis or according to assumptions and cognitive data of a “technical-scientific” nature, but, at the same time, on evaluation options inevitably left to the responsibility of politics because the result of the
weighting of multiple potentially conflicting interests. On this basis, the essay focuses on the need to “govern” the complexity of the relationships between science and politics according to a precise formal legal order, through the structured and binding regulation of environmental production procedures, trying to show, through some cases paradigmatic, the current state of “disorder” that characterizes these relationships in the Italian legal system.

Keywords: Public production of environmental law; Science; Politics; Democracy; Procedures.