ABSTRACT
The view that many environmental questions are effectively non-justiciable in international courts has been challenged by real-world practice that shows that states are increasingly referring environmental disputes to international judicial and quasi-judicial forums. However, while traditional dispute settlement mechanisms are increasingly being used to litigate environmental questions, a distinctive approach has been taken within some international environmental regimes. International environmental law has been a laboratory for experimentation with a new form of dispute management: the ‘compliance procedure’. This chapter provides an overview of contemporary international environmental dispute settlement, a discussion of compliance procedures in multilateral environmental regimes and an assessment of the limits to the ‘judicialisation’ of international environmental dispute settlement.
