Sustainable Development Law and the role of integration: From international to national law. Natural resources law (water, biodiversity, forests) in the EU, Italy and Switzerland

How can sustainability policies be put into visible action? There are several answers to this question. The current article proposes law as one important tool to implement sustainability policies in an effective way. Why this choice? Sustainability is still considered by many an ambiguous and equivocal concept. Its vagueness is, according to this view, a sign of meaningfullness. This viewpoint is counterproductive for the implementation of the concept. One tool that can help to strengthen the implementation or even to clarify the use of the concept is law, thanks to its power to define unclear terms, to set up unified concepts and to elaborate legally binding rules of behaviour, procedures and institutions. The purpose of this paper is to investigate three interconnected topics: -First, the role attributed to law by the international milestones of sustainable development (Agenda 21, Rio Declaration, Johannesburg Declaration and Johannesburg Plan of Implementation). With regard to this topic, relevant issues emerging from these documents should be taken into account: 1)The role of law is confirmed in the mentioned milestones, for example Chapter 8 of Agenda 21. This chapter underlines the strict link between politics and law, in particular the capability of law to translate environment and development policies into action at the national level as well as to implement international agreements in the field of environment and development . 2) Agenda 21 and the Rio Declaration also contained a direct appeal to further develop international law in the field of sustainable development. 3)The key element of the sustainable development concept emerging from these documents is the integrated approach among the three pillars of sustainable development (environmental, social and economic issues). Integration represents the conceptual framework to implement sustainable development. However, how this integration should take place from a legal perspective is not explained. 4) The documents mention the concept of balance among the three pillars. What this concept exactly means and how to balance the three pillars also lack any explanation. These topics, which surely represent the framework for the legal discussion on sustainable development, are in need of deeper analysis. In the legal field efforts to clarify the concept and fill these gaps have been made by the international legal doctrine. -The second aspect, on which the article focuses, is therefore the results achieved by the international doctrinal debate on sustainable development since 1992. The typical issues, at the center of a heated legal debate, were and are: Definitions of sustainable development, a legally or non-legally binding concept, concept/principle/rule, just to mention a few. The article focuses on the theoretical legal debate with the intent to show, on the one hand, the results achieved in the legal field since 1992 on a theoretical level. Some consensus has in fact been achieved on some issues: a) The first attempts to provide a legal definition of sustainable development as well as a legal qualification of its status are now leaving space for a ‘collective approach’ of the term based on the research of those principles and rules which seek to implement it; b) the integration principle is gaining more and more relevance and various regimes of integration are at the center of the legal research. On the other hand, the article also takes into account the current legal trend: The international legal doctrine has highlighted a corpus of principles of international law in the field of sustainable development. This corpus constitutes a separate sphere of international law, not international environmental law, international economic law, or international social law, but International Sustainable Development Law (ISDL). The current trend in international law could also be useful to analyse and implement effectively sustainable development at the national level. That is why the last part of the article deals with the link between theory and practice both at international and national levels. - The article investigates in this final part 1) the emergence of international judicial cases in which sustainable development is used according to the international doctrinal meaning and understanding; 2) selected national legislations concerning the use and management of natural resources. The goal is to find out if the elaborated international scheme could work as an interpretative framework for the national legal implementation of sustainable development. Questions like “Is there a national ‘sustainable development law’ with the same function of the ISDL? Has the principle of integration been implemented by national legislators? To what extent?” will be the guidelines of this last part of the research.