Nature in law: the environment and sustainable development in Portugal’s democratic political-legal framework

This study focuses on the environmental issue in Portugal after the 25th of April, analysing the problem from three main perspectives: the contextual diachronic perspective of the critical Anthropocene construction; the relevance of the environmental issue at national and international level and environmental policies in the Portuguese legislative framework, involving questions relating to the normativity of environmental law, legislative discourse and the semantic value of the expressions “environmental quality”, “nature conservation”, “selfsustaining development”, “sustainable development”, “environmental education”, “natural environment”, and “human environment” as concepts associated with the evolution of environmental policies in post-April 25th Portugal. The question is that the Portuguese legal framework use of these concepts may contain an ambivalent valuation, oscillating between conservationist or environmentalist goals and developmentalist aims. The qualitative research methodology is mixed, using the exploratory and the comparative method according to the principles of concordance and difference in analysing legislative discourse.