Strategic Environmental Communication: Legal Constraints in Developing Countries (A Pakistan-Centered Analysis)

Abstract

Strategic environmental communication has become a major tool of critical importance in developing the comprehension of the populace and in determining the resulting environmental conduct, as well as in the establishment of the policy making process, as environmental crises rapidly increase. In developing nations like Pakistan, though, the functionality of this communication is often limited due to poor or open institutions, poorer legal frameworks and politicization of environmental rhetoric. The current paper will look at how lack of sound access-to-information laws, inability to have proper, effective participation by people and freedom of expression hamper the achievement of strategic environmental communication. It challenges the environmental governance framework in Pakistan especially on the legal loophole between constitutional provisions, statutes and practice regulation on the environment to unmask institutional within the legal embodiment resistant to clear-cut communication. Basing the analysis on comparative experience of other developing states, the work places the events in Pakistan in a larger perspective of the post-colonial lethargy of law and developmental prioritization where the environmental discourse is relegated. In addition, it assesses how the international law, especially the Aarhus Convention and the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals, can yield to transparency and active environmental management. Finally, the paper contends that effective environmental communication must be in place a legal system in which its citizens can participate, have access to information and be held by the system, which has been lacking in the legal framework of Pakistan. The paper has ended by suggesting the avenues of harmonizing the environmental communication strategies of Pakistan with those of the international best practices, to make communication more of a bridge between law, governance and civic engagement as opposed to a bureaucratic control mechanism.