Climate check: Assessing green laws for real-world impact

2024 provides a critical opportunity for parliaments to exert institutional leadership for stronger and more democratic climate action. Currently, all countries which are party to the 2015 Paris Agreement on Climate Change are preparing the second round of their national plans and commitments, covering their climate-related reforms for the next five years.

Parliaments can play a decisive role in the formulation of the next round of climate pledges by conducting an impact assessment of the climate legislation which had been put in place for the purpose of achieving the first round of climate pledges and commitments.

While legislation is of critical importance to achieve national climate commitments, it is equally vital to ensure that the legislation is implemented and has the intended outcomes. Hence, Post-legislative Scrutiny (PLS) or ex-post impact assessment of legislation can help identify implementation shortcomings, areas of improvement and good practices.

While PLS can provide oversight of the implementation gap, the gap between ambitions legislated for and those delivered, PLS can also provide a window for increasing legislative ambitions in line with what the climate science demands.

As the climate crisis becomes an emergency, an increasing number of parliaments step forward in ensuring democratic accountability for environmental and climate policy making.

In this PLS clinic, we will delve into the parliamentary practice of applying climate-proof PLS and the requirements in conducting a climate-inclusive methodology in PLS by parliaments. We will learn from experts and parliamentary practitioners about the effectiveness of the application of climate-proof legislative impact assessments. We will try to capture the do’s and don’ts for parliaments engaging in PLS of environment and climate legislation.

Parliamentary experiences on these topics will be shared by these distinguished speakers:

• Rafael Jimenez Aybar, Practice Lead, Environmental Democracy and Participation, WFD
• Niall Kerr, Senior Researcher in Climate change / Net zero, Scottish Parliament
• Laura Black, Public Participation Specialist, Participation and Communities Team, Scottish Parliament
• Rina Sartika Pamela, Senior Analyst, Parliamentary Expertise Agency, House of Representatives, Indonesia.

The PLS Clinic will be chaired by Dr Maria Mousmouti, Associate Research Fellow at the Institute of Advanced Legal Studies of the University of London and Executive Director, Centre for European Constitutional Law.

We look forward to the opportunity to share and discuss with all participants joining the event.

Conducting a stakeholder consultation is a key moment in post-legislative scrutiny (PLS) activities. There are many ways to consult and collect information as part of PLS, from calls for written and oral evidence to field visits. In this PLS clinic, parliamentary experiences on consultation will be shared by three distinguished speakers. 

WFD's session at the 2024 Summit for Democracy will make the case for an urgent wave of deep democratisation through climate planning in 2024.

Taiwan has become a global focal point for electoral discussions, drawing attention due to its unique democratic landscape. Taiwan has had challenges around ensuring that information is reliable and can be trusted and it has been working towards addressing these challenges and improving its information environment. This in-person event will comprehensively examine these challenges and explore potential solutions. 

This expert conference aims to shine light on political party practices that identify and nurture women candidates and support them on to positions of party leadership. Political leaders representing parties from around the world will both showcase and learn about reforms and innovations that political parties can adopt to better support women candidates. Participants will lead debates on how to identify, nurture, promote, and expand female talent within their parties, focusing on candidate recruitment, support, and selection.

The third clinic of the post-legislative scrutiny (PLS) Community of Practice will focus on drafting a committee’s report on the impact and implementation of legislation, considering different structures and formats of reports, reviewing data and opinions to guide findings about how the law works, enhancing understandability and readability of the PLS report, drafting recommendations which are SMART, and advancing the report’s recommendations at administrative and at political level.