Chapter 1 presents the main argument of Escaping Justice. Accounting for the demand for norm compliance and the domestic risks inherent in norm adoption, this chapter elaborates the ways in which governments strategically adapt transitional justice to advance state impunity. In making this argument I identify a growing global norm of accountability for human rights violations putting pressure on governments to hold perpetrators of wrongdoings to account. Adhering to international norms can carry domestic risks, particularly in cases where governments are culpable for wrongdoings. In responding to the risks of accountability, governments strategically adapt transitional justice to comply with international norms. I identify three strategies that governments use to advance impunity while seemingly complying with international norms, namely coercion, containment, and concession. These strategies are selected based on a government’s ability to control its norm response. The chapter closes with a discussion of the research methodology of the book and ethical considerations.

Prominent policy debates about environmental justice center on drinking water. In California’s Central Valley, this engages a complex, multilayered regulatory landscape. Traditionally, a key gap has been protecting access to groundwater for disadvantaged communities that rely on domestic wells. Addressing this gap requires conceptualizing "what matters" to include groundwater levels, and "who matters" to include these communities. California’s Sustainable Groundwater Management Act substantially reformed California’s groundwater law. It addresses groundwater levels but deals unevenly with disadvantaged communities. It also misses a regulatory opportunity to take a cumulative view of these communities that would recognize that a threat to drinking water is one burden among many that adds to environmental injustice. This chapter introduces the use of the CIRCle Framework to assess rules for conceptualization and how they link to the other CIRCle Framework functions of information, regulatory intervention and coordination. It reveals omissions and mismatches that pose an ongoing challenge to securing environmental justice for communities facing critical threats to groundwater resources used for drinking.

Rules for regulatory intervention aim to ensure that cumulative impacts remain or fall below thresholds of acceptable cumulative harm. A rule has two key dimensions: (1) its strategy – how it changes cumulative harm by reducing impacts, offsetting impacts, restoring, or facilitating coping with impacts; and (2) its approach – how it influences actions that cause impacts by using mandates (sticks), incentives (carrots) or information and persuasion (sermons) to influence adverse actions, or by using direct state action (state rescue). Each strategy and approach has strengths and weaknesses in addressing cumulative harms, and a cumulative environmental problem will likely need a carefully designed mix. In designing this mix, important challenges are ensuring connected decision-making so that actions are not considered in isolation; ensuring comprehensiveness, to avoid overlooking actions, including "de minimis" actions that could cause cumulatively significant impacts; managing costs related to intervention; and adapting interventions to accommodate changes to impacts and new information. Real-world examples illustrate legal mechanisms that include features designed to address these challenges.

Cumulative environmental harms pose pronounced challenges for human recognition, understanding, acceptance, and action. This chapter harvests insights across a wide range of disciplines to unpack the challenges involved in dealing with cumulative environmental problems. These insights point to a crucial role for well-crafted law and policy in responding to cumulative environmental problems. Analyzing cross-disciplinary insights about key challenges produces a framework of four integrated functions required for effective regulatory responses to cumulative environmental problems – the CIRCle Framework: (1) conceptualization: clearly and consistently conceptualizing the matter of concern that experiences cumulative impacts; (2) information: collecting, sharing, and analyzing information about environmental conditions, threats and benefits, rules and activities; (3) regulatory intervention: intervening to ensure cumulative impacts remain within an acceptable range; and (4) coordination among governments and stakeholders to undertake or contribute to the other functions.

Dealing with cumulative environmental problems unavoidably requires repeated interactions (coordination) among multiple and often many actors relevant to the other three CIRCle functions (conceptualization, information, and regulatory intervention). Coordination can promote effective approaches, avoid policy drift, and resolve disputes. Key actors may include multiple agencies and levels of government, quasi-governmental organizations, supranational and international institutions, and nongovernmental organizations representing stakeholders of different kinds. Rules can help overcome significant cost, time, and political disincentives to establishing and maintaining coordination. Two broad types of formal rules for coordination emerge in mechanisms for coordinating conceptualization, information, and intervention: those that establish an institution, and those that provide for interaction in other ways, such as duties to notify or cooperate or undertake joint planning. Legal mechanisms can also expressly provide for dealing with policy drift and resolving disputes between regulatory actors. Real-world examples are provided of legal mechanisms to support these forms of coordination.

The conclusion draws together the findings of the book, assessing how the work-task approach has revealed hidden forms of work, and highlighting those types of work which remain partly or wholly hidden. It reconsiders the relationship between work and the market. The importance of thinking about how early modern people experienced work is asserted.

Information is critical for understanding the conditions of what we care about and cumulative threats to it, so that we can design rules for intervention to protect or restore it. This is about more than just predicting cumulative impacts in the context of project-level environmental impact assessment. It requires gathering and aggregating, in an ongoing way, comprehensive, high-quality and shareable data and analysis, allocating and managing the costs of doing so, and ensuring that information is shared and can be accessed by governments, affected communities, and other stakeholders. Regulatory systems for addressing cumulative environmental problems should be information-makers rather than information-takers. Rules should actively shape the information that is produced, aggregated, analyzed, shared, and understood as legitimate to understand and respond to cumulative environmental problems. More than just a technical issue, information is about power and accountability for cumulative harm and responding to it – a critical influence on environmental democracy, environmental justice, and the rule of law. Real-world examples are provided of regulatory mechanisms that deal with information-related barriers to addressing cumulative environmental problems.