L. Arroyo Jiménez, Infrastructure Planning in Spain – Public Participation and Legal Protection, Journal for European Environmental and Planning Law, 11 (2014) 232-248.
Abstract
This article deals with infrastructure planning in Spanish law. It first describes the role of public participation in planning procedures and analyzes the main participatory instruments foreseen in both general and sectoral administrative law. The distance between a rather adequate administrative legislation on participatory instruments and an unsatisfactory administrative practice in terms of promoting citizen’s participation and seeking acceptance harms the quality of administrative decisions and increases litigation. The article then focuses on the regulation of legal remedies against those decisions and describes recent developments in both academic doctrine and case-law. The main problems related to the effectiveness of judicial protection in this area of law are finally explored.