Beyond punishment: evaluating the effectiveness of environmental restoration orders as a remedy for environmental damage in Uganda

Abstract

As a developing country, Uganda has over the recent years seen land use changes due to development leading to significant environmental degradation. This has created a need for more interventions of a legal nature. The National Environment Act tries to do this through environmental restoration orders that are meant to halt harmful activities, restore damaged ecosystems, and enforce accountability through the polluter-pays principle. However, the existence of this remedy has not yielded much tangible results for the ecological system in Uganda. This dissertation sets out to explore the viability and effectiveness of Environmental Restoration Orders as a legal remedy for environmental damage in Uganda. Using a purely doctrinal methodology, this research critically analyses the existing laws, decided cases, and scholarly works examine the legal foundations of EROs and to assess the effectiveness of restoration orders as a remedy for environmental harm. It reveals that despite Uganda’s strong legal framework and constitutional guarantee of a right to a clean and healthy environment, institutional weaknesses, judicial reluctance, and limited public awareness have hindered the impactful use of EROs. It then looks at comparative studies from jurisdictions such as Kenya, China, Spain, and Italy. Using these as illustrations, it concludes with recommendations that reforms including clearer legal definitions, judicial training, public engagement among others have the potential of improving restoration orders as an effective remedy in environmental governance in Uganda