As a tool for embedding ecological values into national legal frameworks, environmental constitutionalism represents an increasingly important means for navigating the tensions associated with ensuring governance that is sustainable, climate-responsive, and equitable across generations. Constitutionally, we witness authorities identifying and integrating environmental ideas into constitutions across Europe as they provide normative frameworks for protection (from explicit environment-related rights and obligations to implicit and interpretive, based on the broader tenets of human rights and the public interest). This sub-chapter provides a comparative vantage point for how EU Member States incorporate environmental ideas into their constitutions. Through a consideration of constitutional texts, decisions, and innovations, the purpose is to generally determine the similarities and differences in approach within Europe on environmental questions. This comparative analysis also sets the stage for the ex-ante consideration of the supranational dimensions under the European Union and a focused case study of Hungary, where the dynamics between constitutional law and policy on sustainability demonstrates a nuanced picture of progress and the legacy of obfuscation on these matters within the legal framework.

 

A recurrent common denominator is the explicit recognition of a right to a healthy environment. This is a definitive possibility in a number of countries’ constitutions, including Portugal, Romania, Poland, Slovakia, Bulgaria and Slovenia. In these countries’ constitutions the right is more often associated with specific obligation of the state to protect the environmental conditions of both present and future generations. Countries like Portugal (Article 66) have particularly engaged this duality related as rights of citizen and explicit obligations of the state (e.g. pollution control, drafting environmental plans, forming and conducting education), in addition, Slovenia (Article 72) and Romania (Article 35) also guarantee the right to a healthy environment but importantly append the obligations of the state to establish clearly the relevant regulatory and institutional responsibilities.

 

A formal and systematic study of the vocabulary employed in the EU27’s formal constitutional provisions related to sustainability and the environment shows that the frequency of words occurred consistently with the shift in the role of environmental governance in European legal-political thinking. Using a corpus based on the most recent constitutional text or constitutional amendment of the EU Member States, the 20 most frequent words, not counting grammatical stop words, illustrate the emphasis on what is embedded in the legal vocabulary of environmental protection.

 

 

Unsurprisingly, the word ‘environment’ was found to constitute the highest frequency rank (56 occurrences) across the corpus. This lexical centrality reflects both the direct focus of the analysis and the promotion of environmental considerations in the constitutional texts. The environment is presented both as an object of protection, but also as one element of development frameworks in broader social terms. It is consistently articulated as in conjunction with rights, duties, and the responsibilities of the state.

 

One salient pattern across EU constitutions is the explicit recognition of the environment as a legal right. Most of the Member States explicitly recognise the right to a healthy or ecologically balanced environment. Southern and Central-Eastern European countries, namely Portugal, Romania and Bulgaria, explicitly mention the right to a healthy environment (although the commentaries on constitution imply that it should be interpreted and enforced with a duty by both the state and the citizen). Other Northern and Baltic states like Finland and Latvia recognise this right by framing it both as a certain responsibility and collective sense of ownership of environmental matters—in this case as a constitutional event or in statute law.

Non-Negative Matrix Factorisation (abbr. NMF) offers five latent thematic dimensions that reflect normative orientations and legal framings of environmental governance across the EU.

 

 

The first thematic dimension focuses on environmental rights and human health-host. This idea reflects many references to the ability consulted about the ‘right’ ‘healthy’ and ‘human’ environment so that environmental-quality affecting a rights-based frame in which environmental quality becomes not only a policy aim but legally entrenched right. The wording of ‘shall’ ‘majority’ and ‘right’ is reminiscent of language found within the Constitution that conveys individual entitlement and state obligations. Explicit constitutional documentation in countries such as Romania, Slovenia, Portugal, and Bulgaria is particularly pronounced in social terms concerning environmental protection to human well-being and dignity.

 

To systematise the analysis, EU Member States can be broadly grouped into four categories based on their constitutional treatment of environmental protection: (i) explicit and substantive constitutional recognition (e.g., France, Italy, Portugal, Latvia); (ii) procedural and judicially activist approaches (e.g., Germany, Czech Republic, Greece); (iii) general duty-based or implicit models (e.g., Netherlands, Ireland, Hungary); (iv) lack of regulation (e.g., Denmark and Ireland).