Environmental rules versus standards for developing countries; learning from Schafer

Many efforts have been made in the past years to develop an effective environmental law, also for developing countries. Nevertheless, it is not difficult to point at serious problems with environmental law in those developing countries. Problems that have been described in the literature relate both to weaknesses at the normative level (ineffectiveness of regulation) as well as to the well-known enforcement deficits. Implementation problems in environmental law in developing countries have also been studied for many years and many point in this respect at corruption problems as one important source of an enforcement deficit.1 it is to some extent striking that in some developing countries environmental law seems to be promulgated of which it can be predicted ex ante that the material contents will give rise to enforcement problems. In this respect, one can equally often notice that legislation comes into being that seems less fit for the specific situation of developing countries.