Environmental and Energy Democracy in Hungary

This lecture examines the Hungarian environmental and energy democracy from the regime change in 1989 to 2015. The main pillars of environmental democracy (access to information, public participation and access to justice) have been strengthened and the Aarhus’s regime has been incorporated to the Hungarian legal system. Since the projected extension of the Paks Nuclear Power Plant the situation has changed. Despite of the strong legal foundations the Hungarian environmental policy and environmental democracy have been in continuous regression and under attack by this extension. This paper proposes the hypothesis that the enforcing the Aarhus’s pillars in the field of energy policy (i.e. energy democracy) has a huge impact on the environmental democracy. Furthermore energy democracy means socializing and democratizing the forms of energy production and consumption, without harming or endangering the environmental or people. It will be argued here that energy and environmental democracy go hand in hand.