Green-collar crimes and the illegal wildlife trade in Europe

Illegal wildlife trade (IWT) is commonly identified as one of the drivers of global biodiversity loss, but as policy responses focus on law enforcement and organised crime, the role of legal entities can be overlooked. This focus obscures the ways that legal and illegal trade can be intertwined and oversimplifies important, but hidden, dynamics. Current debates and policies on IWT could be targeting the wrong actors, and generating the wrong solutions, leading to ineffective law enforcement strategies and conservation outcomes for wildlife. In this paper we will examine how the lens of green-collar crime can sharpen the focus of policy and enforcement initiatives by examining overlooked actors in IWT in Europe. We develop a new conceptual lens that brings together cutting-edge theories of political ecology and green criminology, and apply this to the European context to deconstruct the power dynamics and inequalities that underlie environmental harms caused by green-collar crime. We use the dynamics of illegal trade in brown bears, eels and songbirds as illustrative examples and consider three cross-cutting issues: consumption, uncertain scientific knowledge and legislative frameworks which shape the trade.