Prosecuting Environmental Crime: Latin America's Policy Innovation

Abstract

Why does Latin America struggle to implement even its increasingly strong and broadly supported environmental polices? To answer that question, this article examines the primary tool of enforcement, environmental prosecution, one of the region's newest and most‐innovative developments in policy and institutional reform. It creates an analytical framework that explains how the two pillars of prosecution, the state and the law, are also its two main weaknesses. Within the state, it examines deficiencies in investigation and resources. Within the law, it focuses on the lack of clarity in laws and in policy regulations that support them. Together, these common and inherent policy challenges make it difficult for governments throughout Latin America to halt crimes such as illegal deforestation, mining, and road building. The article develops a way to understand comparatively how ably policies are supported in practice. Empirically, it draws on five years of fieldwork in the region's two main tropical areas, Central America and the Amazon Basin. In addition to its concrete policy assessments and recommendations, the article brings a new dimension to the study of the state in Latin America and to the field of criminology.

Socio-environmental conflicts resulting from extractive activities in Latin America and Corporate Social Responsibility

“…Although the union between NGOs, communities, lawyers, and scientists has contributed from the juridical and legal perspective to the rejection of these activities, the effectiveness of these alliances is not yet evident to the lack of consistent evidence (Conde, 2017). It is worth highlighting that on some occasions, the prosecution of environmental crimes in Latin America reveals and addresses the deficiencies in environmental policies and their contradiction with state economic policies; hence, the state network and citizen cooperation strategies must be fortified through elements like civil participation, transparent promotion and neighborhood watch (Ungar, 2017).…”

Resilient by Nature: Increasing Private Sector Uptake of Nature-based Solutions for Climate-resilient Infrastructure: A Market Assessment for Latin America and the Caribbean

“…Without the capacity for enforcement, even innovative and well-designed policies to preserve natural capital and support NbS may prove ineffective. Despite the adoption of strong environmental policies in LAC, deforestation, illegal road-building, resource extraction from protected areas, and unauthorized mining still persist throughout the region 45 . Barriers to enforcement include a lack of political will and leadership, technology, personnel, and funding.…”

“…Ministries of environment, for example, may have less enforcement powers compared to ministries of finance. This could prove particularly challenging if conservation goals linked to NbS are at odds with development priorities48 . The impact of limited enforcement resources has been felt by the Buenos Aires Urban Ecosystem Regeneration Program (CaseStudy 7).…”

What’s governance got to do with it? Examining the relationship between governance and deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon

“…Decentralization has allowed for a shared approach from local to international levels of governance to address the context-specific realities of complex and dynamic socio-environmental forest systems [ 20 – 23 ]. In countries where forest legislation is primarily produced at the federal level, subnational levels, including states and municipalities, have often been responsible for mediating how laws and policies are interpreted and enforced on the ground [ 24 , 25 ]. As a result, forest governance may vary greatly across local levels [ 26 ].…”