Soft law

This page identifies initiatives that express ecological jurisprudence through a document that is adopted/endorsed by a collective of civil society organizations, that is meant to serve as draft international or domestic law, and that is designed to facilitate and guide the development of international or domestic ecological law. We acknowledge that the conventional definition of soft law requires some form of explicit support by governments or Inter-Governmental Organizations (IGOs), however we are purposefully expanding the definition for our purposes to include civil society initiatives to influence international and domestic ecological law even if they have yet to receive endorsement from state actors. We do this to help push an evolution in the concept of soft law given that states have to date been laggards in the process of paradigm change inherent in the transition to ecological law. We also note that we only include in this category those civil society initiatives that have received declarations of support or endorsement from multiple groups.