The requirement of full cost recovery for water services including environmental and resource costs in accordance with the polluter pays principle in Art. 9 EU-Water Framework Directive is a unique provision in the history of the European environmental law. The wording of the provision is a...

Article 6(4) of the Habitats Directive requires a weighing up of environmental and economic interests in order to allow for deviation from valid environmental standards. This provision has to be interpreted in the light of the tasks and aims of the European treaties, especially in the light of...

Sustainable development (SD) in not only a political aim of the EU, but has been also introduced in the European Treaties in 1997 as both legally binding task and goal. This paper develops a comprehensive interpretative and dogmatic understanding of these provisions and their possible...

This report is a comparative study of the current legal situation in relation to the forth-coming implementation of the Floods Directive in selected EU Member States, focusing on the question of whether these states incorporate public participation into the process of flood risk mapping and, if...

Governance has definitely become a very iridescent concept in recent years. The term is widely used, meanwhile, in almost all social-science disciplines as well as in the political process. The intention of this paper is not so much to clarify these sometimes vague meanings but to highlight some...

We analyze a dynamic and stochastic ecological-economic model of grazing management in semi-arid rangelands. The non-equilibrium ecosystem is driven by stochastic precipitation. A risk averse farmer chooses a grazing management strategy under uncertainty such as to maximize expected utility from...