Why Study Large Projects? Environmental Regulation’s Neglected Frontier
By Natasha Affolder, Professor of Law, University of British Columbia
Scholarship on responsive regulation has now enriched our understanding of many diverse regulatory spaces: the individual firm, certain industries, local and regional geographies, the levels of national, and even global, business regulation. Legal scholars have mapped out parallel terrains, explaining how environmental law operates locally, at the state or provincial level, nationally, and as a field of international law. Yet little focussed attention has been devoted by scholars of environmental law and regulation to large projects – major infrastructure and natural resource projects that form unique and project-specific regulatory spaces.
The purpose of this paper is to explain why large projects merit the attention of scholars of environmental law and regulation. Large projects provide ‘strategic research sites’ for in-depth examinations of regulatory webs in action. They offer particularly rich terrain for understanding the interplays between state regulation and private orderings, as well as hybrid forms of regulation. Project-specific research also reveals the transnational forces at work in regulatory regimes. Critically, large projects highlight the importance of contracts as a regulatory tool.
The magnitude of many large projects leads to the introduction of specific regulatory regimes to respond to their size and complexity. The Three Gorges Dam. The Chad Cameroon Pipeline. Uganda’s Bujagali Hydropower Project. The Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan (BTC) Caspian Pipeline . Canada’s proposed Mackenzie Valley Pipeline. These examples remind us that large projects are often the sites of social and environmental conflict and provide critical venues for exploring the interplay of financial and environmental regulation. This paper draws on a range of project-specific examples to illustrate the diversity and density of forms of environmental regulation that are emerging in project settings.
In recent years, explaining why companies are “different shades of green” (to use Neil Gunningham’s phrase) has been a significant scholarly endeavour. Project-specific research allows us to ask a further question: why do the same companies behave differently in different project contexts? Crucially, the importance of large projects to developing countries also invites us to extend our understanding of how and when responsive regulation works (and doesn’t) beyond the Western world.
