55th Convegno della Public Choice Society 2018, sezione: ‘Constitutional Design’, Francis Marion Hotel, Charleston, SC (USA),

After the recent economic and financial crises, environmental policies are at the bottom of governments’ agenda. This suggests that a constitution is needed to remove environmental matters from the clutch of political clerisy. There is every reason for envisaging an environmental constitution, but severe difficulties emerge since environment is becoming increasingly global, while decision-makers operate at a national level. This paper focuses on the complexity-based perspective and draws attention on the interdependence (positive and negative feedback loops) of heterogeneous solutions coming from “single disciplines”, uncertainty and the difficulty to predict what the final effects of a set of decisions will be due to bounded rationality and causal ambiguity. The idea of drafting a constitution grounded on scientists’ heterogeneous suite of models and estimates on the intensity and probability of global warming raises a number of problems since data are ex post evaluations while constitutions have an ex ante connotation.