Practical steps and guidance for legal reform

A toolkit for public and private actors

The project is developing a toolkit to help public authorities, businesses, and civil society identify where legal reform is needed and what challenges it may face. The toolkit aims to support legislative solutions that respect the legal system’s core values. It also aims to help remove legal barriers to tackling climate change, biodiversity loss, and environmental degradation, in line with the European Green Deal.

Understanding the legal system through complexity

Holistic examination of legal system reform

The content and impacts of the legal system cannot be controlled by a single actor. According to complexity thinking, the system is sustained and shaped by many public and private actors operating across different forums, societal sectors, and levels of governance. These interactions make the effects of legal changes on the system and society difficult to predict. An overly simple view of law can also limit the effectiveness of individual legislative measures, such as the Climate and Nature Act. The RELIEF project explores how the legal system supports or holds back the transition to sustainability. It also investigates how to reform the system effectively and improve the assessment of the social, economic, and ecological impacts of legal changes.

Towards a green transition

Achieving sustainable transformation goals

Our work focuses on studying how to implement EU sustainability goals within the Finnish legal system without compromising the key values and functions of law. We focus on three policy areas: climate change (net-zero greenhouse gas emissions), biodiversity (protecting 30% of land, sea, and freshwaters) and zero pollution of waters. Through our analytical approach to law, we aim to provide a path to deliver a just green transition.

A path towards sustainability

Six work packages guide our project towards its goals

WP1
Understanding the law’s complexity

The legal system is typically understood as a linear system of institutions and steering mechanisms aimed at promoting societal stability. From this perspective, changes in the law are seen as occurring primarily through the actions of the legislature and are transmitted from legislation to society through various mechanisms. 

Instead of this simplified view, we examine the law as a complex system in which numerous public and private actors participate in its creation and shaping across a wide range of forums, sectors, and levels of governance. In this way, the legal system is emergent; its content and effects are not under the control of any single actor, and the effects of legal changes on the legal system itself or on society are often unpredictable. Viewed through the lens of complexity, the legal system requires a new theory of legal change that can help find solutions to ongoing ecological crises. We develop such a theoretical framework in collaboration with the project’s other work packages.

WP2
Authorities, businesses and civic actors

All actors in society have a role in delivering a sustainability transformation and in creating and shaping the legal system. To explore their legal possibilities and limits, we analyse the Finnish legal system and the actors involved in it: the legislature, public authorities, courts, and business and civic actors. These actors shape how the economic system relates to local ecological conditions and planetary boundaries. Economic renewal can be initiated by civic actors who demand favourable living conditions for themselves, future generations, and non-human species, as well as by public and private actors who promote the realisation of environmental rights. 

WP3
Joint sense-making of legal transformation

The project’s interdisciplinary work is advanced through joint sense-making in close collaboration with other work packages. Our aim is to understand how just transformation can be advanced through leverage points related to the interfaces between the legal system and sustainability science. Drawing on insights from participatory workshops, expert interviews, and surveys, we create a deeper understanding of how new forms of legal agency and action at these interfaces can contribute to sustainability and related transformations. 

WP4
Legal feasibility

Once the policy transformation points have been identified, the next step is to analyse their legal feasibility and legitimacy. Through a novel methodological approach called disciplinary comparison developed by two of the consortium members, we compare the doctrine, tradition, and structure of legal disciplines relevant to sustainability transformation. 

WP5
Societal and legal impact

We assess the broader societal, economic, and environmental consequences of identified transformation points and legal power nodes by applying a complex-adaptive systems framework. We examine legal and socio-ecological systems as dynamic, self-organizing networks where interventions can trigger non-linear, unpredictable societal changes and feedback loops.  

Moving beyond traditional linear regulatory impact assessments, we advance complexity-sensitive RIA that accounts for multi-actor interactions, indirect impact pathways, and stakeholder sense-making and participation. This work helps law drafters, policymakers, and stakeholders understand how strategically targeted legal interventions can spark systemic cascading effects and support transformative shifts toward sustainability. 

WP6
Transformation toolkit

We are responsible for refining the knowledge produced by the rest of the team to build the transformation toolkit. We also support the coordination of activities within the project and ensure that ethical issues concerning openness and high standards of scientific research are considered.