The above notions of justice provide perspectives or theoretical parameters for underpinning policy and practice. How might such perspectives be mobilised in practice?
This book has examined the shortcomings of national regulations and explored European and international legal developments in the production
and trade of GM foods. The role of the ‘scientific citizen’ has also been examined within the politics and regulation of GM foods. The growing amount of international, European and domestic environmental law, and its impact on regulation and enforcement, were examined in chapterfive. Here, the possibilities and beginnings of a ‘green justice’ are explored. This is by no means a polished or finished account of what notions of green justice may mean and how they may operate. It is an opening ambit, a way of thinking about how increasing scholarship, policy and practice involving crimes against the environment can be mobilised around processes of alter- native and new forms of justice. It furthers the work of Kibert (2001) who has asserted that ‘green justice’ seeks to redress the discrimination of ethnic and socially-disadvantaged minorities who experience‘environmental racism’ and the disproportionate effects of pollution and advanced capitalism. As a concept ‘green justice’ has been used by activists and left scholars to examine environmental injustice– the plight of the poor and powerless at the hands of affluent, industrial economies (Alier, 2000). Others have used the phrase to discuss environmental law and policy and the use of court processes (Hoban and Brooks, 1996)– this dimension is also explored. Therefore, the usage of green justice resonates in discourses of protest, resistance and anti- capitalism, but also within legal debates about the role of law. What is briefly discussed here is related to this book’s central concern, namely GM food, rather than focused on broader issues of eco crime.
Citizen and informal justice
To commence is the concept of what I call‘citizen justice’. It is a combina- tion of Jacobs’ exegesis of ‘consumer sovereignty’ and the power of social movements and public resistance. For Jacobs consumer power that insists on ethical sources of goods and services is able to influence the market decisions of large corporations (Jacobs, 1991). The consuming citizen, through pro- duct and company boycotts, is able to exert a bottom-up pressure capable of altering corporate practice. Naturally, such forms of citizen participation rely on reputable resources that provide accurate information. Given that news- papers often provide this resource, corporations have responded with various ‘green washing’ campaigns that seek to mobilise positive publicity of a company’s social and environmental responsibility (Pearce, 2008). However, the consuming citizen is also informed by networks of resistance which also form an important part of citizen justice. The successful ways in which public resistance to environmentally damaging activities has been mobilised to influence state and corporate practice has been widely documented (Mehta, 2005). The illegal and harmful environmental acts of corporations involving pollution, toxic waste and chemicals have often beenfirst identified and then pursued by movements of resistance seeking environmental and social justice (Foreman, 1998; Bullard, 2005). Chapter four identified how
public and consumer resistance, notably across Europe, resulted in a ten-year quasi-moratorium of the production and sale of GM foods. Notwithstanding recent legal rulings requiring EU countries to accept GM foods, several countries maintain an opposition amidst a sustained public voice that has rejected the technology. More recently, as mentioned in the previous chapter, the Indian Government has suspended all plans to commercialise GM crops on the grounds of safety. This position has been overwhelmingly influenced by a mobilised and well networked resistance of farmers, consumers and local communities highlighting unscrupulous and harmful biotech actions (BBC, 2010).
Whether through public protest, petitioning local authorities, boycotting consumer products and services, lobbying politicians or undertaking legal proceedings, ‘people power’ not only provides the first step in detecting harmful environmental acts but also a process through which a form of community justice and social change may be mediated.
Naturally, justice can be mediated through various forms and guises. Speaking on the recent global recession and bank-induced financial crises, John Braithwaite notes how ‘criminologists join the assumption that strengthening regulation, conceived in the expanded-criminal-law powers paradigm, is the priority’ (2010: 439). As he rightly notes, the expansion of state powers and the widening of criminal justice enterprises has repeatedly been observed as ineffective in addressing the complexities of criminal behaviour. Braithwaite calls for various informal justice initiatives, including ‘bottom-up and top down’ approaches and those asserting restorative justice. The previous chapter identified weaknesses in regulatory regimes surround- ing GM foods, and notwithstanding the proposed strengthening of the legal apparatus, Braithwaite’s arguments deserve careful attention. Identifying how restorative processes may have prevented the collapse of Enron (2010: 445) Braithwaite outlines how early and less formal interventions that examine ethics and corporate practice may spot and ‘weed-out’ the beginnings of unlawful and more harmful acts. Within the GM food debate, a model of inspection and monitoring that asserted restorative principles may provide a useful means of identifying underlying corporate and state actions that manifest into widespread national and international action of environmental harm. That said, it still requires a model capable of moving beyond existing notions of partnership that seek to aid the production of GM technologies rather than oversee malpractice. Missing from existing discourses about GM food is a language of ‘justice’. Governments and corporations rarely see victims and offences; instead claims for justice are made through the imperatives of trade. Through trade people will be fed, economies will be stimulated, agriculture will be sustained, etc. To implement a landscape of justice, whether formal or informal, requires a governance model that acknowledges and responds to illegal and harmful acts. Unless biotech com- panies are involved in serious criminal acts such as corruption, regulatory
mechanisms will exist to facilitate trade through partnership. Before moving to informal processes of justice identified by Braithwaite, issues surrounding GM food require shifts in discourses to capture currently accepted acts within notions of harm or else to permit greater transparency and indepen- dent auditing in a spirit of compliance, where compliance has meaning and where non-compliance is viewed not as an administrative oversight but as an eco crime. Moreover, the research for this book detected how correspondence from regulatory authorities in the UK adopted ‘restorative justice’ language when describing their actions. The extent to which restorative justice can be hijacked and manipulated to serve as a pro-trade initiative remains concerning. Whatever forms a green justice should take; it should integrate informal methods of justice and citizen participation with more dynamic mechanisms of regulatory and criminal justice. Existing legal structures should be utilised to deal with acts that damage or destroy the environment. That said, only Australia, New Zealand and Sweden currently have specialised‘environment courts’, and most of their business deals with planning and resource man- agement laws. The following section briefly explores the ways in which the regulations of GM food at an international level may be administered through innovative court processes.
Transnational justice
Transnational justice continues to assert a central place within criminological discourse within the globalised landscapes of contemporary organised corporate and state crime (see Reichel, 2005; Walker, 2003). Therefore, international justice and transnational legal processes are emerging through protocols and inter-state agreements that seek to regulate and prevent illicit corporate activity within the complex webs of global markets (Likosky, 2002). Jamieson and McEvoy (2005: 505) argue that criminology’s engage- ment with transnational justice extends to ‘violations of human rights humanitarian law, crimes against humanity and the related developments in international criminal and transitional justice’. As a result, mechanisms of transnational justice must reflect the changing nature of the modern state within various forms of governance that include non-state and corpo- rate actors. Such innovations in transnational justice must also occur with eco crimes that breach environmental legislation.
As previously mentioned, environmental offences are often seen as administrative matters rather than crimes. That said, the enforcement of international environmental protocols and treaties for both EU and non-EU countries may take place in the International Court of Justice. However, the costs and procedures governing access to the ICJ create barriers to justice. With increasing concerns about climate change, ecological degradation, ozone depletion, food and water security and sustainable development, it is imperative that a legally constituted and representative system of justice
be established to provide leadership in issues of global environmental con- cern. It must also be a court accessible to NGOs and interest groups. Moreover, the growing number of international environmental treaties and agreements require consolidation within one jurisdiction to facilitate judicial decision-making but also much policy work currently undertaken in a vast amount of disparate UN committee work.
Such proposals are by no means new. In 1990 at the World Conference of Environmental Law Associations delegates called for an International Environmental Court as well as resources within the UN to develop educa- tion, training, regulation and prosecution divisions to deal with conservation and ecological security. The importance of environmental law beyond‘policy development’ was asserted and placed on the international agenda as a key principal in sustainable development and the protection of the earth’s natural resources (see Cochrane and Walters, 2008). The UN has moved to regulate the global environment with a proposed World Environment Court at the 1992 Rio Declaration. More recently the Directive of the European Union 2004/35/EC has called upon member states to consider proposals, including a world environment court, for preventing and remedying environmental damage (ICEF, 2005).
The growing number of nations signing up to the increasing number of international environmental treaties represents an emerging global network of collective concern about justice and the environment. The International Court of the Environment Foundation, established in Italy in 1988, con- tinues to promote, research and collaborate with governments, NGOs and legal practitioners to develop and implement an International Environment Court (see Pirro, 2002). Chambers and Green (2005) argue that the growing number of international agreements and institutions has occurred simulta- neously with a proliferation of environmental degradation (cf. Walters, 2009a). What is needed they argue is a new and integrated system of environmental governance that seeks to mobilise and coordinate existing international resources on questions of environmental sustainability. An international environmental court is likely to enable a newly integrated framework for environmental justice. In 2002, at the World Summit on Sus- tainable Development, 130 senior judges from around the world identified that there were sufficient domestic and international laws to protect the environment but a growing number of ‘miscreant corporations and back- sliding governments’ that were unwilling to self-regulate or enforce laws. The judges called for a unified international court of the environment to strengthen the existing legal framework of environmental governance and in doing so, to protect the world’s poor who are ‘often the hardest-hit victims of envir- onmental crimes’ (quoted in James, 2002). Further insistence of the need for an international environment court was recommended at the Conference of the Americas for the Environment and Sustainable Development at Rio de Janeiro in September 2004. In a country continually exploited for its genetic
diversity and richness, the Brazilian Government continues to support an international legal forum that can prosecute and sanction criminal activities that have origins and backing beyond Brazil’s jurisdiction. The UN, through its environment programme and notably the World Environment Organisation, sees the role of a new system of environmental governance as necessitating a mixture of precaution, education, responsibility and control. In other words, an international environment court cannot solely be about punishment and sanction but must also be premised on notions of dispute resolution and restorative justice. As Judge Postiglione (Director of the International Court of the Environment Foundation) argues, such a court should meet the cultural, ethical, social, economic and religious needs of peoples and their environments as well as the legal needs of global governance (Postiglione, 2004).
Of course, there will be criticisms that such a court will lack the ability to enforce its orders, particularly against powerful nations such as the US that fail to sign up to international environment treaties. However, such interna- tional bodies are not solely about enforcement. They are about providing leadership for nation-states to develop their own regulatory frameworks for dealing with environmental security and social justice. Moreover, they are about harm minimisation that can be achieved through dispute resolu- tion and notions of restorative justice. As a result, an international environ- ment court should co-exist with a range of restorative, self-regulatory and participatory models.
Establishing such mechanisms remains an ongoing challenge for parties to the Cartagena Protocol. However, it is important to recognise that the more vulnerable countries, notably developing nations, are now able to seek the security and support of over 100 countries against biotech companies and governments that seek to exploit their natural resources or violate their rights to self-determination. As mentioned, issues of compliance and redress especially against non-party countries remain an ongoing issue of concern– and perhaps a weakness of the Protocol. That said, the developing countries have been given both a voice and forum. As a result, the emergence of a ‘symbolic justice’ becomes important for national ecological sovereignty, protection and conservation. Nation-states have been given a mandate to develop their own legislative frameworks and the confidence to resist the aggressive tactics and practices of powerful corporations and governments. Moreover, an international environment court will provide a focal point for coordinating and directing the increasing amount of environmental law. Such a role is pivotal for the development of domestic legal frameworks, and for environmental protection and justice (cf. Walters, 2009b).
Concluding comment
The production and sale of GM foods is a global business dominated by a monopoly of biotech industries and supported by the world’s most powerful
governments. With such influential and affluent backing, the proselytisers of GM food and its associated technologies provide a formidable voice against campaigns of resistance and oppositions. In doing so, concepts of harm and justice become malleable and supple for political and economic gain. As a result, diverse discourses of power necessitate analytical understandings of the ways in which both the strong-arm and subtleties of persuasion are played out. Green criminological narratives must continue to engage with these networks of power and governance in order to contribute to global debates such as GM food. As I have written elsewhere, green criminology:
must not be reduced to green party politics but must be a position pre- mised on the principles of environmentalism and broader issues of environmental justice. Such an approach recognizes that environmental victiminology is as much about issues of race, class, poverty, trade and economics as it is about the environment. Moreover, a green criminology must harness discourses in both risk and rights. It must be a global criminology, one that examines notions of transnational justice within expanding global economies. This is a hire-wire act omitted from the criminological repertoire but essential within changing international economic and political landscapes where crime respects no sovereign domains and where crime control must be dynamic.
(Walters, 2007: 1999) Green criminology is emerging as knowledge of resistance, one that chal- lenges mainstream disciplinary discourses as well as government and corpo- rate rationalities. Scraton (2001) argues that what is needed is the expansion of ‘knowledges of resistance’ that identify knowledge/power complexes within contemporary forms of governance and critique the injustice of gov- ernmental regimes that construct notions of truth for material and political gain. The promotion of new critical narratives in green criminology provides voices of resistance against state and corporate activities that harm humans, non-humans and the natural environment. This calls for a politics of engagement with diverse sources of collective concern.
Notes
1 A healthy debate exists within criminological discourses over nomenclature. Pre- ferences over the naming of this critical narrative are debated around various ideological, political and environmental perspectives. Its origins are found in the works of Lynch (1990), and others have since utilised the title‘Green Criminology’ to encapsulate a broad scholarship devoted to crimes and harms against humans and non-human species (South, 1998, Groombridge, 1998, Lane, 1998, Lynch and Stretesky, 2003; Beirne and South, 2007, Ruggerio and South, forthcoming). For some, ‘environmental criminology’ or eco-global criminology is preferable (see White, 2008 and 2009); for others ‘conservation criminology’ (Herbig and Joubert, 2006; Gibbs et al., 2010) and eco-critical criminology (Seis, 1993). I use
green criminology here to harness all those perspectives that broadly comprise the green criminological movement.
2 Stan Cohen, Barbara Hudson and many others have, for example, long advocated this line of criminological enquiry (see Downes et al., 2007; Hudson, 2003). 3 For a general overview of game theory and the social sciences, see Morrow
(1994).
4 See also debates within ecofeminism which assert women’s victimisation through male environmental exploitation (Eaton and Lorentzen, 2003).