A Protected Area Isn't Protected If Nobody Enforces the Law
Can courts make governments enforce their own laws?
Written by Lea Nierlich and Tatum Kennedy
In March 2023, the Vjosa became Europe's first Wild River National Park, celebrated worldwide as proof that a wild, free-flowing river could still be saved. Less than a year later, the Albanian government passed a law quietly rewriting the rules for protected areas across the country, opening the door to large infrastructure and tourism projects even inside the strictest conservation zones. Environmental groups, including our partners at EcoAlbania, and a fifth of parliament took the law to the Constitutional Court. The case ended in a 4 to 4 tie. A tie is not a majority, so the law survived, and the protections built into Europe's newest national park turned out to rest on considerably less than they appeared to.
Parts of the adjacent Vjosa-Narta wetland, a breeding ground for flamingos and a stopover for migratory birds, have since been earmarked for large-scale resort development, drawing protests in Tirana and an anti-corruption investigation into how the area's protected status was changed.
None of this required breaking a written law. Much of it was made legally possible by one.
The enforcement gap
Vjosa is not an outlier. Across Europe, and especially in the Western Balkans, protected areas are routinely designated on paper without the systems needed to actually protect them. EU nature law does not just ask governments to draw a line on a map and call it done. It asks them to set real, site-specific conservation goals, put active management in place, prevent habitats from deteriorating, and properly assess any project that could threaten a protected site before it goes ahead. In much of theWestern Balkan region, that obligation stops well short of practice. Management plans go unwritten. Impact assessments are skipped or rubber-stamped. Illegal construction and gravel extraction continue in areas that are, legally, off-limits, and hundreds of small hydropower projects have been proposed inside sites that are supposed to be protected or on track to become so.
The reasons are structural, not incidental. The institutions meant to monitor and enforce these rules are underfunded and understaffed. The civil society groups willing to fight violations in court are chronically under-resourced next to the developers and state agencies they are up against. And for countries seeking to join the EU, there is a strong incentive to formally adopt EU nature law, since it is a condition of membership, but a far weaker one to actually enforce once it is on the books.
Albania's case shows how thin that formal compliance can be. The Constitutional Court's reasoning was that the 2024 law was merely a "framework," with no direct environmental consequences of its own. Any real harm, it said, would only come later, through the implementing decrees the law made possible. The European Commission has since called for the law's repeal as part of Albania's EU accession process. It remains in force.
When courts do act
None of this means courts are powerless here. Elsewhere in Europe, litigation over protected areas has produced real, enforceable outcomes.
In Spain, the European Court of Justice ruled in 2019 that the government had failed to protect the Doñana wetlands from excessive groundwater extraction for agriculture and tourism. Years earlier, a luxury resort built illegally inside another Spanish protected site, complete with villas, a hotel, and a golf course, was ordered to be fully demolished by the country's Supreme Court after environmental groups challenged its legality. In the Netherlands, a court ruled in early 2025, in a case brought by Greenpeace, that the government had acted unlawfully by missing its own nitrogen reduction targets for protected areas, and backed the ruling with a financial penalty if the targets are missed again.
Germany, Poland, Portugal, Greece, France, and Estonia have each been taken to court over how they handled protected sites, and lost. Poland's logging in the Białowieża Forest was found unlawful. So was Portugal's approval of a nuclear plant expansion near protected habitat, France's decision to extend hunting seasons into the middle of bird breeding periods, and Germany's failure to write conservation plans for roughly 15 percent of its Natura 2000 sites. In each case, a law existed, a government failed to apply it, and a court was willing to say so forcefully enough to require a real change on the ground, not just an acknowledgment on paper.
The tension between mandate and market
Governments rarely abandon environmental commitments out of pure disregard. They tend to do it under the banner of economic necessity. In cases like the Albanian coast, state authorities frame legislative carve-outs as vital development strategies, meant to attract foreign investment, create jobs, and boost local economies. When courts step in to halt these projects, critics often accuse the judiciary of overreach, arguing that unelected judges are taking over powers that belong to elected officials to set economic policy. That argument misreads what environmental law is. When a government designates a protected area or writes conservation targets into law, it sets a binding boundary, not a suggestion. Overriding that boundary later through executive decree or a hastily passed amendment is not flexible governance. It is an erosion of the rule of law. If economic priorities can retroactively invalidate legal protections whenever convenient, the law stops functioning as a constraint at all and becomes optional guidance instead, valid only until the next investor arrives.
For developers, that turns environmental law into a simple financial calculation. When the potential fines or legal costs are small, next to the millions a luxury resort or a hydropower plant can generate, a legal challenge is not much of a deterrent. It is just a cost of doing business.
Why the same tool produces different results
Part of the answer is timing. Developers often push construction ahead before courts can issue a final ruling, betting that a half-built or finished project will be harder to undo than a paper permit. Once a resort worth tens of millions is standing, courts and governments are notoriously reluctant to order it torn down, which is exactly why the Spanish demolition case is the exception rather than the rule.
But the deeper answer is about what happens after a ruling, not just whether one is issued. The gap between the Doñana case and the Vjosa case is not really about the strength of the underlying law. Both involved real, documented harm to legally protected habitats. What differed was whether a court was willing to treat the law as an enforceable obligation in the first place, and whether the surrounding legal and political system was built to make that obligation stick once it ruled. Research into constitutional courts more broadly finds much the same pattern outside environmental law: courts often sidestep high-profile confrontations through exactly the kind of procedural reasoning the Albanian court used, and their rulings tend to hold only where organized groups keep pushing for them to be implemented long after the verdict.
A single favorable ruling can protect one river for one case. It took the residents and organizations along the Vjosa's Shushica tributary nearly three years to win a court order stopping four hydropower dams there in December 2024. That victory did not, on its own, change the incentives that keep drawing new hydropower proposals, new resorts, and new legislative carve-outs back to the same protected places, again and again. Each case has to be fought individually, against opponents with far greater resources and far more patience to outlast any one legal challenge.
Bridging the asymmetry
That is the deeper obstacle. Developers, infrastructure investors, and the state agencies backing them have deep pockets, specialized legal teams, and years of patience. Local communities, civil society groups, and underfunded environmental NGOs are routinely outmatched, forced to fight one exhausting battle at a time while the next project is already moving through approval.
This is the enforcement gap AllRise built its Park initiative to address. Rather than fighting isolated, reactive battles against individual developers, Park builds legal infrastructure: a network of experts, case support, and cross-border collaboration that turns local violations into systemic accountability. It works with communities, NGOs, and governments alike to identify priority cases, gather evidence, and mount the kind of sustained, cross-border litigation that a single local group rarely has the resources to carry alone. Park's own starting point is the Western Balkans, a region where EU accession has made adopting nature law easy and enforcing it hard, and where it is piloting a model built to expand well beyond the region. The imbalance it works against is the same one running through every case in this article, from Doñana to Vjosa: developers with time and resources on their side, communities without. Connecting monitoring on the ground with legal strategy across borders starts to shift that balance, so that scattered local violations stop being one-off fights and start adding up to enforcement that holds, long after the headlines and the protests have moved on.
A protected area is only as protected as someone is willing to enforce it. That is the gap AllRise is built to close.
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Disclaimer: This article was developed with the assistance of artificial intelligence (AI) tools, which were used to support research, fact-checking, and editorial review. All content has been reviewed and approved by the author(s), who remain responsible for the accuracy, interpretation, and conclusions presented.