Development of an analytical scheme
Policy recommendations play a key role in the context of environmental crime. They function as a ‘first step’ into the development of a supporting system for law enforcement agencies (LEAs).
There is a long history of environment policy leading back to the 1970s. Environment issues are on the political agenda for decades and a lot of political initiatives in that field have been established. What has changed, however, is the prioritization. As Maria-Mirela Curmei and Christian Martin Kurrer (2024) emphasize: “Environment policy has recently been moved to centre stage in EU policymaking.”1
Although environment policy has established in the recent years and key initiatives have been set and developed, there is a different picture regarding environmental crime and environment enforcement.2 There are several reasons for that: First, some academics point to the ‘invisibility’ of that type of crime as substances and materials involved are not always visible in the first moment. They have to be made visible and measurable by using specific instruments. This is also the reason why these types of crime are labelled as ‘victimless’ as ‘nature’ cannot report on crime as humans can do. Thus, nature needs a ‘spokesman’. This argument lacks a bit on plausibility as there are several ‘speakers’ along the chain of investigation, including the initial information from civil society or employees in legal businesses. Secondly, and this is the more relevant argument: Environmental crime is complex by nature. There is a high number of regulations for different types of environmental crime and many cases are just handled as wrongdoings. As Angus Nurse mentions: “[…] much environmental enforcement is regulatory or administrative in nature, particularly in respect of corporate environmental wrongdoing, which is often categorized as accidental wrongdoing, largely considered to be the fault of ‘rogue’ employees or the unintended consequences of governance failures” (Nurse 2022: 327). Thus, the landscape of environmental crime is highly ‘fragmented’ and sanctions and penalties are low. Although there has been made relevant changes in legislation (see blog post “Organized Environmental Crime: Navigating the Complexities of Legal and Technological Frontiers”), there are still issues to tackle.
However, due to an ongoing increase of waste produced and a professionalization of the waste management sector in the last decades, legal businesses play a key role in committing and addressing environmental crimes. On the one hand they implemented waste management cycles in terms of re- and upcycling but on the other hand there is also an interest in cutting the costs. Thus, policies must also include further actions besides the legislation to deal with consumer behaviour and legal businesses that have the knowledge and skills to bypass legal frameworks. The question of ‘who is more responsible’ will not be an issue here, especially as questions of responsibility are complex. However the case may be, it shall be clear, that it is not only about legal frameworks and harmonisation. I will explain it by introducing one of the priorities of the EMPACT policy cycle which is
"[…] to disrupt criminal networks involved in all forms of environmental crime, with a specific focus on waste and wildlife trafficking, as well as on criminal networks and individual criminal entrepreneurs with a capability to infiltrate legal business structures at high level or to set up own companies in order to facilitate their crimes."3
To do so, law enforcement agencies have to be trained on different modus operandi and equipped with new technologies. As a consequence, policymaking must also include the (financial, material and political) support of technical developers as well as training facilities and research in the field. As the EnviCrimeNet emphasizes in their Layman’s report (2023): “[…] environmental crime is a serious issue, but we still count on weak structures to combat this hazard efficiently at a global level.“4
The development of policy recommendations is one key instrument to support actors in the field of environmental enforcement. To avoid recommendations which will not be relevant, in PERIVALLON, a scheme has been developed to guide this development process (Figure 1). The aim of this analytical scheme is to present concrete steps as well as to point to the underlying strategic dimension.
Three steps guide the process. In the first step, needs and challenges of the groups of interest will be defined. In PERIVALLON, the definition has been made in the following tasks: Inputs came from task 2.1 which provides research on waste and pollution crime, from task 6.3 which provides insights from the evaluation of the pilots’ implementation and from task 7.4 which develops the policy recommendations. These tasks from the empirical basis of the problem definition. Technical developers as well as law enforcement agencies contributed to these tasks ensuring a multi-perspective problem-definition.
After the definition of the key challenges and problems, recommendations will be defined in the second step. Following questions guide this process: What are the needs? What hast to be changed / provided to solve these issues? In this step, it will also be defined if the developed recommendations are policy recommendations or just recommendations on an individual or organisational (and not political) level.
In the third step it will be defined on which level (local, regional, national, European, global) these recommendations will be implemented and which instruments to choose (criminal law, administrative law, others).
The foundation of these steps are the strategic goals (SG), operational goals (OG) and further aspect to consider (ATC), which have to be defined before starting with the development.
In the case of the PERIVALLON project, the strategic goals are the stimulation of the cooperation between private and public entities as well as the facilitation of cross-border information exchange. These are long-term goals.
To sum up and just give some key insights, although environmental issues are on the political agenda in the last decades, the picture differs when looking at environmental enforcement. To better understand the concrete challenges, an analytical scheme has been developed to guide the process of the development of policy recommendations by staging the definition of strategic and operational goals in the beginning, starting with concrete needs and challenges and including actors from different perspectives.
[1] Curmei, Maria-Mirela / Kurrer, Christian Martin (2024): Environment Policy: General principles and basic framework, p. 1. URL: Environment policy: general principles and basic framework | Think Tank | European Parliament (europa.eu) [accessed 10.12.2024]. [2] Nurse, Angus (2022): Contemporary Perspectives on Environmental Enforcement. In: International Journal of Offender Therapy and Comparative Criminology. 66(4). Pp. 327–344. [3] europol.europa.eu (2022): EU Policy Cycle – EMPACT. URL: https://www.europol.europa.eu/crime-areas-and-statistics/empact?trk=public_profile_project-title [accessed 10.12.2004]. [4] EnviCrimeNet (2023): Layman’s report. URL: https://www.envicrimenet.eu/https-www-envicrimenet-eu-wp-content-uploads-2023-10-lifesatec-pdf/ [accessed 10.12.2024].Written by Sandra Balbierz
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