In the battle to address Europe’s biodiversity crisis, fixing its implementation gap—the gap between EU nature law on the books, and on the ground—is vital. Europe’s private nature governance revolution, underpinned by the UNECE Aarhus Convention, is a core part of its response. This article breaks new empirical ground in understanding how those mechanisms have been working in practice, and their knock-on effects for traditional enforcement by the State. We develop an innovative methodological tool, the Nature Governance Effectiveness Indicators (“NGEIs”), enabling the first quantitative measurement of the effectiveness of public and private nature governance in practice. In collecting data on these indicators, we create a novel dataset spanning three jurisdictions and 23 years, giving a unique insight into Europe’s “environmental democracy in action”. We regress the NGEIs against the Nature Governance Index, an original longitudinal index measuring the evolution in nature governance laws over this period. Our results provide the first systematic empirical evidence that, despite the widespread embrace of private nature governance laws on the books across our studied jurisdictions from 1992 to 2015, the enhanced citizens’ rights conferred by these laws are not being consistently used in practice. They also reveal that, despite these inconsistencies in usage of the Aarhus mechanisms in practice, passing private governance laws can in fact improve levels of State enforcement of EU nature law in practice. For policymakers seeking to increase enforcement of EU nature law on the ground, harnessing what we term the shadow of heterarchy, by strengthening private governance rights, may therefore be a more effective means of doing so than simply ratcheting up existing traditional governance mechanisms such as levels of maximum criminal penalties or civil fines.

在解决欧洲生物多样性危机的斗争中，解决其实施差距——欧盟自然法在书本上与实际情况之间的差距——至关重要。以 UNECE 奥胡斯公约为基础的欧洲私人自然治理革命是其应对措施的核心部分。本文在理解这些机制如何在实践中发挥作用以及它们对国家传统执法的连锁效应方面开辟了新的经验基础。我们开发了一种创新的方法工具，即自然治理有效性指标（“NGEIs”），能够在实践中首次量化衡量公共和私人自然治理的有效性。在收集这些指标的数据时，我们创建了一个跨越三个司法管辖区和 23 年的新数据集，对欧洲的“环境民主在行动”提供独特的见解。我们根据自然治理指数（Nature Governance Index）回归 NGEI，该指数是衡量这一时期自然治理法律演变的原始纵向指数。我们的研究结果提供了第一个系统的经验证据，表明尽管从 1992 年到 2015 年在我们研究的司法管辖区的书籍中广泛接受了私人自然治理法，但这些法律赋予的增强公民权利并未在实践中得到一致使用。他们还揭示，尽管在实践中使用奥胡斯机制存在这些不一致，但通过私人治理法实际上可以提高国家在实践中执行欧盟自然法的水平。对于寻求在实地加强欧盟自然法执行的政策制定者，