ABSTRACT
It is easy to be gloomy about transnational environmental crime (TEC) and the prospects of effective responses being found and implemented soon. Each week brings more bad news of imminent extinctions due to wildlife poaching and environmental harms and injustices resulting from toxic waste dumping, ozone trafficking, water theft, deforestation and over-fishing. The demand for many illegal environmental products keeps growing, new types of crime and new markets are emerging and climate change is adding another layer of environmental destruction and human misery to the problems associated with TEC. Beyond the extent of these problems themselves, the political, strategic and operational challenges confronting states and the international community in dealing with TEC are immense. TEC is such a complex and multi-layered area that it confounds the making of generalisations. For example, as Wyatt (2013) shows, wildlife trafficking encompasses a range of crimes with different crime scripts (Cornish, 1994) that involve offenders with various (sometimes mixed) motivations and that have sundry victims, who suffer diverse outcomes of variable severity. There is nothing straightforward about TEC nor, therefore, about its remedies. There are no ‘one-size-fits-all’ solutions. Policing strategies, penalties and other responses need to be tailored to individual crimes and their particular circumstances.
