ABSTRACT
Precautionary environmental decisionmaking is crucially dependent on access to information—in particular, information on environmental risks. Yet traditional legal systems have tended to favor administrative and corporate secrecy, thereby monopolizing knowledge in the hands of governmental authorities or private stakeholders. This chapter describes innovative initiatives in the United States and Europe to establish an environmental “right-to-know” for civil society, by mandatory disclosure both of government-held information (from the 1966 U.S. Freedom of Information Act to the 1998 UNECE Aarhus Convention and the Council of Europe’s 2009 Tromsø Convention) and of industry-held risk data (through pollutant release and transfer registers, and through court-enforced access to “privileged” documen-tation—for example, on tobacco-related health risks). These disclosure strategies to facilitate precautionary action have spread across the Atlantic and triggered a “third wave” of environmental regulation, replacing or supplementing command-and-control and market-based instruments. However, the chapter also highlights continuing transparency deficits (sometimes resulting in “manufactured uncertainty,” prompted either by economic interests or by precaution against countervailing risks such as terrorism) with regard to risk-sensitive information of common concern.
