PLS Clinic - 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.

• Rafael Jimenez Aybar is the environmental democracy adviser at WFD. Rafa has over 12 years of experience supporting parliamentarians worldwide to advance environmental governance through his work with the environmental parliamentary association GLOBE, as part of the International Secretariat. He has led the formulation and delivery of numerous demand-driven, capacity-building interventions, from providing policy development capacity support to facilitating the exchange of best legislative practices, in collaboration with the national government agencies and civil society of the beneficiary countries, as well as with knowledge institutions such as the LSE Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment and the UCL Institute for Sustainable Resources. He has worked on climate change mitigation and ecosystem-based adaptation and disaster risk-reduction, marine and terrestrial biodiversity governance including fisheries, forests and drylands, environmental economic accounting and the natural capital approach inter alia, and promoted policy coherence and convergence for the attainment of the Sustainable Development Goals.
• Niall Kerr is a Senior Researcher (climate change / net zero) in the Scottish Parliament Information Centre (SPICe). Niall focuses on the areas of electricity, heating buildings, and adaptation to climate change. Prior to working in SPICe, Niall was a Research Fellow at the University of Edinburgh focused on heat and energy efficiency policy and the use of evidence in policy, working in the School of Social and Political Science. Niall has a PhD from the University of Leeds on the political, behavioural and economic dimensions of energy retrofitting the UK housing stock.
• Laura Black is a Public Participation Specialist in the Participation and Communities Team in the Scottish Parliament. Laura has worked extensively across the public and third sector, with a passion for quality public engagement, participation strategy and practice. Engaging a range of communities through creative and co-production methods has developed key skills in community engagement, project management and cross-sector partnership working. As a Participation Specialist at the Scottish Parliament, Laura works on the strategic development of the Participation and Communities Team teams’ delivery of deliberative and digital participation methods.   This includes how to effectively monitor and evaluate the impact of participation for people and communities externally, and the business of Parliament.
• Rina Sartika Pamela, is a legislative monitoring analyst at the Law Monitoring Centre, Parliamentary Expertise Agency of the Secretariat General of the House of Representatives of the Republic of Indonesia. During her five years in this sector, she provides support in monitoring law implementation and in the process of judicial review at the Constitutional Court. As a monitoring analyst, Rina has accomplished several activities regarding monitoring and evaluating the implementation of laws relating to environmental issues, availability of natural resources, climate change, mining, economy and human rights.
• Dr Maria Mousmouti is Associate Research Fellow at the Institute of Advanced Legal Studies of the University of London and Executive Director, Centre for European Constitutional Law. Maria specialises in law-making, legislative quality and effectiveness, legislative design and drafting and equality and fundamental rights. Her expertise covers law-making, legislative drafting, ex-ante and ex-post legislative scrutiny and gender-sensitive scrutiny of legislation. She lectures at the Institute of Advanced Legal Studies of the University of London. She has worked in more than 25 countries in the EU, Southern Europe, the Middle East, Africa and Asia to support legislative reform initiatives through evidence-based advice and capacity-building.