Abstract
This article analyzes the situation of the most important instrument of command and control existing in the Colombian environmental legislation: the environmental license. Since its first formal regulation, on behalf of Decree 1753 of August 3, 1994, has received several modifications which, apparently, have made, in spite of its importance, in an instrument of command and control by exception. The article revises on the scope of each of the modifications and the justifications put forward by the government of the day, to establish if indeed they were founded on strict gains against the control of environmental impacts from projects, works or activities, or if, on the contrary, the changes correspond to other outside interests to strict environmental control.This journal is registered under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International Public License. Thus, this work may be reproduced, distributed, and publicly shared in digital format, as long as the names of the authors and Pontificia Universidad Javeriana are acknowledged. Others are allowed to quote, adapt, transform, auto-archive, republish, and create based on this material, for any purpose (even commercial ones), provided the authorship is duly acknowledged, a link to the original work is provided, and it is specified if changes have been made. Pontificia Universidad Javeriana does not hold the rights of published works and the authors are solely responsible for the contents of their works; they keep the moral, intellectual, privacy, and publicity rights.
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