Environmental Groups and Legal Expertise: Shaping the Brexit Process

A close look at environmental NGO advocacy during Brexit and how legal expertise can be a resource in moments of crisis.

This book explores the use and understanding of law and legal expertise by environmental groups. Rather than focusing on the courtroom, however, this volume scrutinizes environmental NGO advocacy during the extraordinarily dramatic Brexit process, from the referendum on leaving the EU in 2016 to the debate around the new Environment Bill in 2020. In an effort to show how legal expertise is more than a campaign tool or the threat of litigation, this book describes the ways in which law can provide distinctive ways of both seeing and changing the world. Legal resources in the environmental sector are not just a practical limit on what can be done, but an opportunity to investigate the very understanding of what should be done. Legal expertise was heavily and often effectively used in the anomalously law-heavy Brexit-environment debate. This book will clarify this moment and the NGO collaboration that made it possible for environmental advocates to call upon legal expertise in a moment of crisis.