Abstract

Against a background of intense scholarly focus on and regulatory interest in the concept of resilience, this chapter considers the extent to which it is possible to deliberately design and embed features of resilience into environmental law and regulation. The chapter argues that, upon closer scrutiny, some of the characteristics most often associated with resilience are indeed already present in much of modern UK environmental law. Importantly, however, this is best explained not by reference to deliberate design features of the law, but by reference to the ad hoc and often piecemeal development of the law. In response to this, the chapter considers the ways in which public participation mechanisms – prominent in much of modern environmental law – may serve as a more useful avenue for embedding reliance in the law.