Erik Bengtson and Oskar Mossberg awarded grant from the Swedish Energy Agency

Erik Bengtson and Oskar Mossberg are awarded a grant from the Swedish Energy Agency for the project "Environmental pledges within the energy system – critical legal and rhetorical perspective”.

Businesses and organizations often assert their intentions to limit or offset negative environmental effects. Such environmental pledges are commonplace in the more or less publicly made communications of commercial and public actors. The pledges can fill PR purposes, e.g. act as advertisements, but they can also function as material arguments when applying for legal approval or public support. Environmental pledges are productive acts, performing practical functions. However, it is unclear to what extent these pledges can be considered legally effective, as promises or otherwise.

In this four-year project Bengtson and Mossberg exploits legal and rhetorical perspectives to develop a theoretical framework dedicated to examining and explaining the functions of environmental pledges in today’s energy system. The framework is used to explore how adjusting regulatory frameworks can contribute to sustainability and legal certainty, whether the regulations be public, or private self-regulation on the energy market.

(Image removed) Larry D. Moore, CC BY-SA 4.0, Wikimedia Commons.