In this interview, Daniel Bertram discusses the research and findings of the recent article in Environmental Politics – Penal Environmentalism.
Congratulations on your recent article! What is the key message that you hope people take from this research?
Thank you! The proposal to recognise ecocide as an international crime – though having a long historical pedigree – has recently sparked a lot of discussion among activists, policymakers, and academics alike. While this discussion is highly relevant and important, I fear that its terms are currently construed too narrowly. During my PhD research, I discovered that criminal justice is assuming an increasingly central role in environmental politics more broadly – whether through activists labelling polluters as criminals, a reinvigorated push by police and prosecutors to enforce existing environmental criminal laws, or the creation of new offenses (both general offenses à la ecocide and sector-specific offenses such as wildlife crime) at national, transnational, and international levels. In the article, I propose the concept of “penal environmentalism” to capture this broader turn to criminal justice in environmentalist discourse and practice. In doing so, I hope to divert attention away from ecocide towards the many different environmental criminalisation initiatives that are currently taking hold.
The ICC’s Office of the Prosecutor just released its policy on addressing environmental damage through the existing Rome Statute last December. Does this pragmatic workaround make the Vanuatu-led amendment push redundant, or does the absence of a standalone crime still matter?
The Prosecutor’s ambition in the new Policy is certainly laudable. There are, however, important constraints that limit what it can achieve in practice. First, there are legal constraints. While it may be possible to prosecute some instances of environmental wrongdoing under the umbrella of the four crimes currently included in the Rome Statute – genocide, crimes against humanity, war crimes, and aggression – doing so will require charting new legal ground. The Policy lays out some interesting pathways in this respect, but the fact remains that the four “core” crimes were not primarily meant to cover environmental damage. Whether the legal arguments advanced in the policy hold water in court, and whether they can meaningfully address serious environmental grievances of different sorts, remains to be seen.
Second, there are also larger political and institutional constraints. It is no exaggeration to say that the ICC is currently going through a moment of major crisis. Not only do large powers such as the US, Russia, or Israel openly defy the Court, but even influential member states such as Italy or Germany have shown or expressed reluctance to comply with their obligations under the Rome Statute. Moreover, the Office of the Prosecutor operates under significant resource constraints and – as the Policy recognises – would require assistance of various kinds in order for the Policy to be fully implemented. So yes, in this sense, the absence of a standalone crime still matters in practical terms – apart from the fact that campaigners have long insisted on the symbolic effect of including ecocide as full-fledged crime with its own definition and normative weight.
Ultimately, however, my point in the article is not so much to weigh in on this debate of whether a new crime is really needed or whether workarounds can be found in the Rome Statute (others, such as Darryl Robinson, have discussed this issue at length). In fact, this focus on the peculiar legal and political dynamics of the ICC is exactly what I hope to move beyond with the concept of penal environmentalism.
A Private Member’s Bill on ecocide was introduced in the Indian parliament in January 2026, and Ghana’s parliament is pushing for similar legislation. But critics argue the ICC has historically targeted leaders from the Global South. Isn’t there a real risk that penal environmentalism ends up criminalising post-colonial states?
Indeed, there is a legitimate concern that even if the crime of ecocide were to be included as an international crime, its enforcement may follow the same patterns of selective prosecution of racialised individuals from the Global South that the ICC has long been accused of. (These concerns have been poignantly formulated by Adam Branch & Liana Minkova, Eliana Cusato & Emily Jones, and Tim Lindgren, among others). There is a difference between the international criminalisation of ecocide and its introduction into national penal codes, however. Depending on the exact terms of the legal reform, the latter may give post-colonial states a tool to enforce environmental norms and combat environmental destruction – that is the hope, at least. Of course, one can still be concerned that governments may abuse this tool to target vulnerable individuals such as poor, occasional poachers rather than combatting the structural causes of environmental degradation in post-colonial states – causes that often are intricately tied to the persistent legacies of colonialism.
One of my objectives in coining penal environmentalism is to enable a more nuanced conversation around the normative stakes of different environmental criminalisation projects. Before we jump to any normative conclusions, we need to ask questions such as: who is wielding criminal power and why? Which visions of justice and assumptions about the role of criminal law underpin these projects? And how does this reliance on criminal law in pursuit of environmental objectives either reinforce or challenge existing power structures? While legal scholars tend to be more interested in questions of legal and institutional design (such as the “best” definition of ecocide), I believe these broader social contexts are an important part of the normative conversation as well – and one that political scientists are particularly well-equipped to provide insights on.
The 15th UN Crime Congress met in Abu Dhabi late April. What concrete outcome from this Congress would you consider a meaningful step forward?
The Congress provides an important opportunity for the international community to discuss the place of the environment within the global criminal justice agenda. Given the symbolic, non-binding nature of the key outcome document, the Abu Dhabi Declaration, I do not expect any major leaps from the Congress. Still, submissions from civil society organisations and the background reports prepared for the Congress make clear that environmental considerations have become a lot more prominent in the multilateral discussions dedicated to matters of criminal justice.
Arguably a more interesting discussion is taking place under the auspices of the UN Convention against Transnational Organized Crime, which recently convened an expert group tasked with reviewing the extent to which the Convention effectively adresses environmental crime. The experts are specifically mandated to consider the “possibility, feasibility and merits of any additional protocol to the Organized Crime Convention” in this context. During a meeting in February, a coalition of oil-exporting countries torpedoed the idea of an additional protocol, but the issue will likely return at the parties’ meeting in October (COP 13).
The point I am trying to make is not to argue in favour or against a particular political programme or legal proposal, however. At a more fundamental level, I want to draw attention to this increasing merger between environmental politics and criminal justice in discursive, institutional, and legal terms. So far, the emergence of this penal environmentalism has somehow escaped the radar of many critical observers, including academics and many civil society initiatives. I hope that my article will spark a nuanced debate around the normative stakes of this penal turn, and that this debate can then feed into and inform policy discussions.
Finally, what’s next? Are you publishing more on this topic?
This topic is dear to my heart, not least because I have closely engaged with it for the past five years in the context of my PhD research (see my previous work on the topic here, here, here, and here, for instance). Going forward, I have two projects in mind to further our collective understanding of penal environmentalism. First, I would like to deepen the normative discussion by engaging with the work of green criminologists in particular, which have long been at the forefront of conceptualising environmental criminal justice. Second, I am interested in mapping out the empirical landscape in more detail, including the coalitions of actors and their strategies that are shaping this nascent field of practice. I hope others will join me in this task. To understand the various dimension of this emerging phenomenon, legal scholars, critical criminologists and political scientists need to start talking to one another.
Bio
Daniel Bertram holds his PhD on the criminalisation of ecocide from the European University Institute in Florence, Italy. Since December 2025, he is a post-doctoral researcher at the Van Vollenhoven Institute for Law, Governance and Society at the University of Leiden, where his work is embedded in the ERC-funded DigiFood project. Next to Environmental Politics, his research has appeared in Transnational Environmental Law, Global Environmental Politics, Journal of International Criminal Justice, Journal of Environmental Law, and Foro Internacional, among others.
