Comparing Environmental Law Systems

This article revisits the overlooked field of comparative environmental law. It examines contributions to this field from the late 1960s to 2022, highlighting the methodologies proposed, their shortcomings, the main aspects and angles taken by the literature, and the curious lack of engagement by experts in comparative law proper with environmental law systems. On the basis of a structured examination of the literature, the article extracts four main aims or purposes that may guide this line of research: (i) clarifying the initial system by contrasting it with a foreign system, (ii) using the basic conceptual features of a known system to analyse and understand a foreign unknown system, (iii) evaluating and fine-tuning a system or an aspect thereof, and (iv) extracting analytical categories that can serve to map the entire field or areas of it.