Environmental Democracy Index

Caution: While EDI assesses the content of a country’s constitution, freedom of information laws, major environmental legislation across several sectors, and case law where appropriate, it does not provide a comprehensive measurement of implementation of the law, nor does it assess laws at the subnational level. Biases have been reduced to the extent possible within the adopted research method. Separate evaluations of the indicators, sources, explanations, and scores were conducted by 2 local lawyers independent of each other. These evaluations were reviewed by WRI staff, with further reviews by civil society groups in the TAI network and by governments. All of these steps help to reduce bias. However, other safeguards, such a double blind scoring by the first 2 local lawyers, were not applied. Additionally, each legal culture has approaches to legislation and its interpretation. Broadly the common law, civil law, law in the former Soviet bloc, and Islamic juridical traditions may differ in the way they approach legislation, its content, import, and interpretation. The method adopted respects these individual juridical traditions and looks only to whether the elements searched for in each indicator are present within the meaning of that country’s tradition. As such it is not possible to standardize legislative language approaches or interpretation across all countries, and local juridical approaches are present in scoring and reasoning.