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There has been never-ending debate concerning the right to a healthy environment and the extent to which the law has provided for or guaranteed the right in national and international contexts. Whilst some countries have expressly recognised the right to a healthy environment in their constitutions and subsidiary laws, others have relied on regional instruments and treaties to guarantee such rights, especially where domestic legislation is either lacking, inadequate or ineffective. This article will contend that constitutionalising (rather than regionalising before a human rights commission or treaty) environmental rights domestically would improve environmental outcomes in Nigeria. To further buttress the constitutionalisation argument, this article will undertake a critical analysis of the right to the environment in South Africa which has constitutionalised the right to the environment. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper uses the case of the proposed Pondoland National Park in South Africa, which is in the center of policy debates about biodiversity conservation, development, and resource rights in the Wild Coast area of South Africa. It explores whether the making of the case for the conservation of the Wild Coast, which relies on global environmental discourses, has ideologically and practically clarified local poor people's resource rights. It does this by tracing the genealogy of the Pondoland National Park discourse, which originates from scientific research and individual and group lobbying, to help explain the disjuncture between post-apartheid environmental policy discourses and what takes place in practice. The paper concludes that the reliance on global environmental discourses in research done in support for the Pondoland National Park complicates the role of the nation-state in terms of environmental governance, and that this can negatively affect the poor and powerless residents of the area in question. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]