European environmental governance has radically transformed over the past two decades. While traditionally enforcement of environmental law has been the responsibility of public authorities (public authorities of the EU Member States, themselves policed by the European Commission), this paradigm has now taken a democratic turn. Led by changes in international environmental law and in particular the UNECE Aarhus Convention (UNECE, United Nations Economic Commission for Europe Convention (1998). Convention on access to information, public participation in decision-making and Access to Justice in Environmental Matters (the Aarhus Convention), signed on June 25, 1998.), EU law now gives important legal rights to members of the public and environmental non-governmental organisations (“ENGOs”) to become involved in environmental governance, by means of accessing environmental information, participating in environmental decision-making and bringing legal proceedings. While doctrinal legal and regulatory scholarship on this embrace of “bottom-up” private environmental governance is now substantial, there has been relatively little quantitative research in the field. This article represents a first step in mapping this evolution of environmental governance laws in the EU. We employ a leximetrics methodology, coding over 6000 environmental governance laws from three levels of legal sources (international, EU and national), to provide the first systematic data showing the transformation of European environmental governance regimes. We develop the Nature Governance Index (“NGI”) to measure how the enforcement tools deployed in international, EU and national law have changed over time, from the birth of the EU’s flagship nature conservation law, the 1992 Habitats Directive (Directive 92/43/EEC). At the national level, we focus on three EU Member States (France, Ireland and the Netherlands) to enable a fine-grained measurement of the changes in national nature governance laws over time. This article introduces our unique datasets and the NGI, describes the process used to collect the datasets and its limitations, and compares the evolution in laws at the international, EU and national levels over the 23-year period from 1992–2015. Our findings provide strong empirical confirmation of the democratic turn in European environmental governance, while revealing the significant divergences between legal systems that remain absent express harmonisation of the Aarhus Convention’s principles in EU law. Our data also set the foundations for future quantitative legal research, enabling deeper analysis of the relationships between the different levels of multilevel environmental governance.

在过去的二十年里，欧洲的环境治理发生了根本性的转变。虽然传统上环境法的执行是公共当局（欧盟成员国的公共当局，他们自己由欧盟委员会监管）的责任，但这种范式现在已经转向民主。由国际环境法的变化，特别是联合国欧洲经济委员会奥胡斯公约（UNECE，联合国欧洲经济委员会公约（1998 年）。关于获取信息、公众参与决策和在环境问题上诉诸司法的公约（the Aarhus 1998 年 6 月 25 日签署的公约），欧盟法律现在赋予公众和环境非政府组织（“ENGO”）成员参与环境治理的重要合法权利，通过获取环境信息、参与环境决策和提起法律诉讼等方式。虽然关于这种“自下而上”的私人环境治理的理论和监管学术研究现在相当多，但该领域的定量研究相对较少。本文代表了绘制欧盟环境治理法律演变的第一步。我们采用词法计量学方法，对来自三个法律来源（国际、欧盟和国家）的 6000 多条环境治理法律进行编码，以提供第一个显示欧洲环境治理制度转变的系统数据。我们开发了自然治理指数（“NGI”）来衡量国际、欧盟和国家法律中部署的执法工具如何随着时间的推移而发生变化，源于欧盟旗舰自然保护法——1992 年栖息地指令（Directive 92/43/EEC）的诞生。在国家层面，我们关注三个欧盟成员国（法国、爱尔兰和荷兰），以便对国家自然治理法律随时间的变化进行细粒度的衡量。本文介绍了我们独特的数据集和 NGI，描述了用于收集数据集的过程及其局限性，并比较了 1992 年至 2015 年 23 年间国际、欧盟和国家层面的法律演变。我们的研究结果为欧洲环境治理的民主转向提供了强有力的实证证实，同时揭示了法律体系之间的重大分歧，这些分歧仍然缺乏对欧盟法律中奥胡斯公约原则的明确统一。