Year: 2026
Type: article
Abstract: This Article examines the articulation of sustainable development within comparative constitutional design, offering a framework for evaluating its normative and institutional depth across national constitutions. Through a deformalized and functionally attuned analysis, it explores how constitutional texts mediate the tension between ecological protection and economic aspiration, drawing on the longstanding distinction in ecological economics between weak and strong sustainability. By retracing the textual presence and structural positioning of sustainability provisions—through the lenses of law-and-political-economy and transformative constitutionalism approaches—this Article reveals wide variation in constitutional commitments to ecological transformation. It argues that strong sustainability requires the structural embedding of ecological limits within constitutional governance, thereby subordinating economic goals to the planetary boundaries that condition human and institutional life. Weak sustainability, by contrast, preserves aspirations to unlimited economic growth while providing only marginal environmental safeguards. Against this distinction, this Article calls for concise, principled constitutional provisions that directly engage hegemonic and counter-hegemonic modes of environmental protection, internalize ecological limits, and acknowledge the necessarily incremental nature of constitutional change. True constitutional sustainability, it concludes, lies not in textual volume, but in embedding ecological imperatives at the core of constitutional democracy and the rule of law.
DOI: 10.1093/ajcl/avag001
Author: Francesco Lucherini
Institution: University of Bologna
Language: English
Topic: Environmental law and policy
Subfield: Law
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: hybrid
Estimated APC paid: $4,402
OpenAlex ID: W7155384494