ROMANIAN LAND GOVERNANCE AT THE ECOLOGY–LAW INTERFACE: ADVANCING SYSTEM-BASED PLANNING
ROMANIAN LAND GOVERNANCE AT THE ECOLOGY–LAW INTERFACE: ADVANCING SYSTEM-BASED PLANNING

Summary/Abstract: Systems ecology has progressively influenced environmental legal doctrine by repositioning planning and land governance as adaptive, threshold-sensitive, and evidence-dependent regulatory domains. Legal scholarship stresses that the rule of law must internalize ecosystem complexity through procedural flexibility, resilience standards, and cross-sectoral institutional coherence. At EU level, systems governance is embedded in binding climate-neutrality duties, LULUCF carbon-sink accounting, and mandatory ex-ante cumulative-impact assessment, ensuring legality controls for green infrastructure and spatial permitting. Romania shows high formal compliance with EU environmental law, but still faces a systemic rule-of-law implementation gap. Planning legality is weakened by insufficient use of binding ecological indicators and unequal data access for public authorities and stakeholders. Persistent institutional fragmentation further limits administrative coordination and effective, legally predictablel and-use and forest governance. However, systemic legality is achieved not by formal compliance alone, but by enforceable, court-validated administrative competences—not discretion. Rule-of-law certainty inplanning depends on predictable procedures, ex-ante data integration, and reviewable land-use decisions. Romania’s local and regional authorities now operate as first legal responders to spatial pressures created by digital platforms and ecological shocks. The paper calls for a shift from formal transposition to enforceable, resilience-based administrative law, secured through judicial review. Results directly support practitioners in legally predictable spatial planning, forest governance duties, data rules, and multi-level co-regulation—without administrative discretion.

• Details
• Contents