Regulating a Thousand Cuts

Cumulative environmental problems are complex, insidious, slow-motion tragedies that are all too common, from biodiversity loss, to urban air pollution, to environmental injustice. Taking an interdisciplinary, comparative, and applied approach, this book offers a new framework for designing law and policy solutions using four integrated regulatory functions: Conceptualization, Information, Regulatory intervention, and Coordination (the CIRCle Framework). Rules that deliver these functions can help us to clarify what we care about, reveal the cumulative threats to it, and do something about those threats – together. Examples from around the world illustrate diverse legal approaches to each function. Three major case studies from the United States, Australia, and Italy provide deeper insights. Regulating a Thousand Cuts offers an optimistic, solution-oriented resource and a step-by-step guide to analysis for researchers, policymakers, regulators, law reformers, and advocates. This title is also available as open access on Cambridge Core.

Rebecca L. Nelson is an associate professor, Melbourne Law School, University of Melbourne, and Director of the Melbourne Centre for Law and the Environment. She was the Law Council of Australia’s Mahla Pearlman AO Young Environmental Lawyer of the Year (2014), IAH/NCGRT Distinguished Lecturer (2016), an Australian Research Council DECRA Fellow (2018–2021), and a Eurac Research Institute for Comparative Federalism Federal Scholar, in residence in 2023.