Public participation has become a recurring theme and a topical issue in the field of international environmental law, with many multilateral environmental instruments calling on states to guarantee effectively the concept in their laws and practices. This book focuses on public participation in environmental governance, in terms of public access to environmental information and public participation in environmental decision-making processes. Drawing on the body of international best practice principles in environmental law and taking a comparative stance, Uzuazo Etemire takes Nigeria as a key case, evaluating its procedural laws and practices in relation to public access to information and participation in decision-making in environmental matters. In working to clarify and deepen understanding of the current status of environmental public participation rights in Nigeria, the book addresses key issues in environmental governance for developing and transitional countries and the potential for public participation to improve the state of the environment and public wellbeing. This book will be of great interest to undergraduate students (as further reading) and post-graduate students, academics, researchers, relevant government agencies and departments, policy-makers and NGOs in the fields of international environmental law, environmental justice, environmental/natural resource management, development studies and international finance.

Constitutions can play a central role in responding to environmental challenges, such as pollution, biodiversity loss, lack of drinking water, and climate change. The vast majority of people on earth live under constitutional systems that protect the environment or recognize environmental rights. Such environmental constitutionalism, however, falls short without effective implementation by policymakers, advocates and jurists. Implementing Environmental Constitutionalism: Current Global Challenges explains and explores this 'implementation gap'. This collection is both broad and deep. While some of the essays analyze crosscutting themes, such as climate change and the need for rule of law that affect the implementation of environmental constitutionalism throughout the world, others delve deeply into geographically contextual experiences for lessons about how constitutional environmental law might be more effectively implemented. This volume informs global conversations about whether and how environmental constitutionalism can be made more effective to protect the natural environment.

Reflecting a global trend, scores of countries have affirmed that their citizens are entitled to healthy air, water, and land and that their constitution should guarantee certain environmental rights. This book examines the increasing recognition that the environment is a proper subject for protection in constitutional texts and for vindication by constitutional courts. This phenomenon, which the authors call environmental constitutionalism, represents the confluence of constitutional law, international law, human rights, and environmental law. National apex and constitutional courts are exhibiting a growing interest in environmental rights, and as courts become more aware of what their peers are doing, this momentum is likely to increase. This book explains why such provisions came into being, how they are expressed, and the extent to which they have been, and might be, enforced judicially. It is a singular resource for evaluating the content of and hope for constitutional environmental rights.

C.O.OKIDl1 I welcome the opportunity to prepare a Foreword to the book on Environmental Policy and Law in Africa, edited by Kevin R. Gray and Beatrice Chaytor. It is a pleasure to do that because the book is a contribution to the cause of capacity building for development and implementation of environmental law in Africa, a goal towards which I have had an undivided focus over the last two decades. There is still some belief in and outside Africa that for developing countries in general, and Africa in particular, development and implementation of environmental law is not a priority. This belief prevails strongly in many quarters of the industrialised countries. In fact, the view is held either out of blatant ignorance or by some renegade industrialists who fail to appreciate Michael Royston's 1979 thesis that Pollution Prevention Pays.2 That group, for obvious reasons, must have their correspondent counterparts in Africa to provide hope that industries rejected as derelict in the West or inoperable due to rigorous environmental regulation, can find homes to which they can escape and dump their polluting industries.