I will have a lecture concerning my PhD-research at ECPR's General Conference, Université de Montréal 26-29 August 2015.
Abstract
This
study examines the Hungarian environmental and energy democracy from the regime
change in 1989 to 2015. The main pillars of environmental democracy (access to
information, public participation and access to justice) have been strengthened
and the Aarhus’s regime has been incorporated to the Hungarian legal system. It
has been put in this study that environmental democracy belongs to the
normative-empirical theories of democracy. I will elaborate the constitutional
and legal bases of environmental democracy and I will argue here that since
2010 several restrictions have been carried out about the environmental
democracy by the Hungarian governments. Since the projected extension of the
Paks Nuclear Power Plant this situation has increased. Despite of the strong
legal foundations, the Hungarian environmental policy and environmental
democracy have been in continuous regression and under attack. This paper
proposes two main hypothesis. According to the first, the Hungarian
environmental democracy has been evolved by the legal constitutionalism, and
its restrictions elaborated here are in conjunction with the political
constitutionalist era since 2010. My other hypothesis concerning the energy
democracy, which means socializing and democratizing the methods of energy
production and consumption, without harming or endangering the environment or
people. It has been argued that the prevailing of the Aarhus’s pillars in the
field of energy policy (i.e. energy democracy) has a huge impact on the
environmental democracy.
Presentation
