This paper takes ecological debt as a measure of environmental injustice, and appraises this idea as a driving force for change in the international legal system. Environmental justice is understood here as a fair distribution of charges and benefits derived from using natural resources, in order to provide minimal welfare standards to all human beings, including future generations. Ecological debt measures this injustice, as an unfair and illegitimate distribution of benefits and burdens within the social metabolism, including ecologically unequal exchange, as a disproportionate appropriation and impairment of common goods, such as the atmosphere. Structural features of the international system promote a lack of transparency, control and accountability of power, through a pro-growth and pro-freedom language. In theory, this discourse comes with the promise of compensation for ordinary people, but in fact it benefits only a few. Ecological debt, as a symptom of the pervasive injustice of the current balance of power, demands an equivalent response, unravelling and deconstructing real power behind the imagery of equally sovereign states. It claims a counterhegemonic agenda aiming at rebuilding international law from a pluralist, 'third world' or Southern perspective and improving the balance of power. Ecological debt should not only serve as a means of compensation, but as a conceptual definition of an unfair system of human relations, which needs change. It may also help to define the burdens to be assumed as costs for the change required in international relations, i.e. by promoting the constitutionalization of international law and providing appropriate protection to human beings under the paradigms of sustainability (not sustainable development) and equity. Key Words: environmental justice, ecological debt, international legal system Résumé Ce document prend la dette écologique comme une mesure de l'injustice environnementale, et évalue cette idée comme une force motrice pour le changement dans le système juridique international. La justice environnementale est comprise ici comme une répartition équitable des charges et des avantages découlant de l'utilisation des ressources naturelles, dans le but de fournir des normes minimales de bien-être à l'humanité tout entière, y compris les générations futures. La dette écologique est une mesure de cette injustice, comme une distribution injuste et illégitime des avantages et des charges dans le métabolisme social. Il comprend l'échange écologiquement inégal, comme une appropriation disproportionnée et la dépréciation des biens communs, tels que l'atmosphère. Les caractéristiques structurelles du système international favorisent un manque de transparence, le contrôle et la responsabilité du pouvoir, par le biais d'un pro-croissance et la langue pro-liberté. En principe, ce discours est livré avec la promesse de compensation pour les gens 1 Prof. Jordi Jaria i Manzano, Tarragona Centre for Environmental Law Studies, Universitat Rovira i Virgili, Tarragona, Cat...

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This article begins by questioning the capacity of the concept of sustainable development to stabilize social reproduction and foster global justice. Based on interdisciplinary perspectives on global governance, it discusses the way in which global law fails to cope with the resonance of advanced capitalism in the world society and ecological systems. Our analysis focuses on the regulatory and institutional features of three interwoven functional regulatory regimes (global finance, energy, and environmental protection), which demonstrate structural governance dysfunction at the expense of ecological integrity and justice in the global realm. The article further examines the capacity of global law to foster a ‘compositive’ and ‘compensatory’ contribution to global justice and the stability of the Earth system through global constitutionalism. In this context, it concludes that Neil Walker's global law approach provides a fertile analytical framework for describing the patterns of interaction between different species of global law but proves to be particularly ‘slippery’ in its normative propositions regarding the gap between global law and justice. Drawing from the Earth system approach, we argue in favour of a global material constitutionalism, recognizant of ecosystemic boundaries and socio-environmental impacts of the global socio-economic metabolism. We consider that the gap between global law and global justice is best addressed by devising more deliberative patterns of transnational governance, as well as ecosystem and human rights approaches, in order to accommodate the fair and equitable internalization of material limits across global regulatory regimes that act as functionally differentiated economic constitutions of advanced capitalism.

This chapter provides a general perspective of monitoring and compliance mechanisms in multilateral environmental agreements related to the protection of biodiversity. Starting with the specificities that explain the emergence of endogenous enforcement solutions in these sorts of treaty, it makes a conceptual distinction between monitoring and compliance mechanisms. On this basis, it appraises their institutional design and procedural outline, as well as the nature of the measures that these mechanisms issue in order to elicit compliance and enforce treaty obligations. It concludes with an overall assessment of these mechanisms' performance, providing a final reflection on new and remaining research directions.

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