Policing and New Environmental Governance

Abstract

During the first half of the 20th century, responsibility for enforcing environmental laws often fell to police. Some of the earliest policing activities focused on counteracting illegal and criminal activities in the area of hunting and poaching (Loo, 2006; Wijbenga et al., 2008: 323). However, since the 1970s, environmental laws expanded to regulate a growing raft of environmental problems (e.g. waste and pollution), and with this expansion came many different regulatory and administrative agencies, at many different levels, to deal with environmental crimes (White, 2011). New treaties and legal instruments established a plethora of enforcement and compliance functions, powers and procedures to be carried out by an increasingly complex cohort of police; specialist environmental protection agencies; customs and specialist environmental courts (United Nations Office of Drug and Crime (UNODC), 2012: 87). This diversity of actors has meant that those who carried out environmental policing functions were often not police (White, 2013b: 459). In this sense, environmental policing, like many other forms of policing (Brodeur, 2010), extended well beyond the traditional ‘police force’. White nicely illustrates this point in his discussion of the United States’ term ‘conservation police’, which ‘broadly refers to fish and wildlife officers, wildlife management officers, game wardens, park rangers, and natural resources police’ (2011: 13).