Executive thought : an environmental agency in a modern ERA

Abstract

Ten years ago, the Environment and Resources Authority came into being not simply as a successor to a previous institution, but as a deliberate act of policy design. The demerger of the Malta Environment and Planning Authority in 2016 was a recognition that environmental governance had grown sufficiently complex, and consequential, and again sufficiently distinct in character, to warrant a dedicated national regulator. What followed was a decade of institution-building that this volume, in part, attempts to document.

As Chief Executive, my perspective on this decade is inevitably operational. This book’s chapters trace important themes, but my daily reality and those of ERA’s directors is the machinery behind them: our staff, the authority’s systems, the legislative instruments which ERA plays a crucial role in developing, the reporting obligations, and the sheer breadth of a remit that continues to expand. Comprehensive as this volume might be, it can only illuminate selected facets of what ERA does. The full picture, as evident from our wide array of experts and dedicated staff members, is wider still. [extract]