Rhett Martin
School of Law and Justice, University of Southern Queensland
Law Sustainability • Regulation • Sustainable Development
Journal of Sustainability
An Applied Scholarly Journal on Sustainability
Volume 1, Issue 2
December 2025
Regulating Sustainability – How Law is used in Relation to Sustainability Objectives
Submissions Open: 1 July 2025 • Submission Deadline: 30 June 2026
Special-Issue Editors
Special-Issue Information
Law can provide compliance and accountability mechanisms to help progress toward ecologically sustainable development and other sustainability objectives. The ‘tools’ within environmental and land use planning regulation, for example, include environmental impact assessments and sustainability indices that establish standards for assessing and responding to sustainability challenges. Regulation can also establish pathways for accountability and how to meet the Sustainable Development Goals.
Despite this positive agenda for law and sustainability, there is often a gap between the objectives of regulation and their outcomes. Why? A possible answer relates to the inherent limitations of regulation. Another possible answer is the drafting of regulation, and their ‘methodologies of practical implementation’ are deficient. What is needed in our research is the capacity to identify and respond to regulatory failure and gaps that may account for the deficiency between the stated intention of regulation and the outcomes. We believe this is especially relevant when discussing regulation of ecologically sustainable development objectives. We explore these issues and other related matters in this special edition.
Objective & Scope
The objective of the Special Issue is to identify the inherent limits of regulation when it comes to regulating progress toward sustainability objectives. By making this identification we can assess how to respond to regulatory failure and gaps, understand what adjustments to regulation are necessary and overcome what we refer to as the ‘practicality challenge’ between intention and performance outcomes that often fall short when it comes to the challenge of sustainability. The types of studies and contributions sought include, but not limited to, (1) regulating principles of ecologically sustainable development, (2) regulating precautionary risk management, (3) can long term risk mitigation be successfully regulated? (4) use of sustainability criteria and indicators in regulation, and (5) use of science in regulation.
Keywords
Precautionary Risk Management • Criteria and Indicators of Sustainability • Science and Regulation • Balance as a Regulatory Imperative
Articles
No articles in this Special Issue yet.