Transnational environmental crime: exploring (un)charted territory

This article focuses on transnational environmental crime. We illustrate that both an environmental and a transnational perspective are still for the most part uncharted territory in criminological theory and research, but also acknowledge that scholars have started filling the green criminological chart in recent years. Environmental crime has in fact been studied, but often in a less theoretically and methodologically profound way compared to for example street crimes. This risks painting a limited picture of contemporary crime and we therefore argue that there is a need to develop better and broader understandings of the topic. This requires research that grasps the complexity and transnational nature inherent to the phenomenon by focusing on multiple contexts, levels of analysis and actors. In this article, we try to partly fill this gap by contextualizing transnational environmental crime along three dimensions, that is to say its conceptualization, tiology and governance. We clarify what lines of thought are present for each of those dimensions and outline the (un)charted theoretical and empirical field. We illustrate this by means of two cases: waste and natural resources