Transnational Environmental Crime: An International Political Economy of Illicit Markets and Criminal Networks

In this incisive book, Lorraine Elliott investigates the global markets, supply chains, and networks of criminality that make transnational environmental crime (TEC) a highly lucrative business. Three case studies are at the core of this analysis: the illicit market in ozone-depleting substances, timber trafficking, and the international illegal wildlife trade.

Through an innovative international political economy (IPE) lens, Elliott shows how TEC enterprise functions through illicit commodity chains and production networks that are shaped as much by material factors of supply, production and labour as by criminal practices. She demonstrates the nature and extent of fluid, porous and co-constituting links between licit and illicit economies. Finally, she points to the importance of a political economy of the everyday to understand how local spaces and local actors are embedded in global TEC markets and supply chains.

Transnational Environmental Crime is a valuable resource for scholars and students of international relations, international political economy, criminology, political and conservation ecology, economic geography and economic sociology. The book’s evidence-based insights into TEC markets and trade, commodity chains and production networks will also find a readership in international and non-governmental organizations with a TEC research and policy focus.