Symposium – The environment and its conflicts: ecological transition and the dialectic between public interests and public authorities

The complexity of today’s multi-class society, deriving from the multiplication of interests and public protection interventions obtained by such interests, is such that the discretionary decisions of public administrative bodies are not limited to balancing established interests, but rather become similar to choices of a political nature, which are not easy to resolve. This phenomenon therefore accentuates conflicts: those between different interests and legal goods, and between different public powers operating at different levels of government. This is particularly evident in the environmental field, the governance of which often conflicts with rules and policies to protect other interests, which are sometimes contiguous to one another and linked to the same ecological purposes: climate, energy, landscape, agriculture, soil, biodiversity, urban planning and tourism. This draws out some problems that hinder and complicate implementation of the ecological transition. This collection of essays investigates these very aspects, highlighting both the problems encountered by environmental and climate regulation, in view of conflicts with other relevant public interests, and a number of potential legal solutions to overcome the aforementioned stalemate. Some of these possible solutions are procedural in nature; others use the rationale of general principles of law; while others yet rely on public planning.