Il concetto di sviluppo sostenibile nello spazio giuridico globale

ABSTRACT - THE CONCEPT OF SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT IN THE GLOBAL LEGAL SPACE The first chapter of the thesis is dedicated to examining the way in which the environmental and social demands of sustainability, which emerged in contemporary social consciousness in the second half of the twentieth century, were gradually incorporated within the global legal space first, and foremost in documents of international organizations in the last decades of the last century. The second chapter focuses on the analysis of the social and cultural assumptions of this necessary openness of law to ecological and environmental issues, beginning with the slow but thwarted awareness of the need and urgency to control the economic initiative of public and private powers through the introduction of the concept of "sustainable development" within the "global legal space." The third chapter addresses the controversial issue of the legal status of environmental protection. The issue at stake in the discussion is the determination of the concrete scope of the latter. It must be premised that in general, environmental and social sustainability constitutes one of the fundamental normative contents of legal responsibility in our time (at least with regard to the epochal transformations brought about by industrial technologies and the potentially catastrophic scope of their effects, if removed from all forms of public control and limitations). Nonetheless, the use of the so-called soft law model, characterized essentially - as will be seen in more detail later in the chapter - by the lack of a real coercive dimension, is becoming increasingly common in our times. The last two chapters of the thesis examine theoretical implications and institutional spillovers of the capital nexus between accountability and sustainability that emerges from the preceding analyses. In fact, in constitutional democracies, built on the legal primacy of fundamental, inclusive and inalienable rights over patrimonial, exclusive and alienable rights, the sense of responsibility from which the legal prominence of environmental sustainability flows translates concretely into concern for future generations and concern for the survival of planet Earth.