Restorative justice for corporate environmental harm ex crimine. A transformative justice?

Restorative justice for corporate environmental crimes could be framed within the broad context of the attempts to connect law with nature (“ingraining nature in law”, in Vinuales’ words), in the Anthropocene epoque. Alongside these attempts, restorative justice for environmental offences might ‘transform’ penal policies for environmental crimes by shifting the focus from the punishment of the offender to the holistic restoration of the concrete relations between the humane and the natural dimension. This would not only enhance the current systems of remedies for environmental victims, so far mainly rooted in pecuniary compensations; but also trigger systemic changes in the way to regulate the access to and the use of the common good “environment”. Therefore, it would also lead to ‘systemic’ transformative effects in the way of doing business. However, the application of restorative justice for environmental crimes, these crimes falling outside the traditional use of restorative justice for intersubjective offences, poses some unique theoretical challenges. The end of this thesis is precisely that of providing a theoretical-conceptual background to support the shift of paradigm from traditional penal law formalistic responses to environmental crimes, so far mainly based on utilitarian and retributive logics, towards a restorative justice approach that aims at redressing victims considered in their intertwined relation with nature. This framework critically assesses the potentialities as well as the limits of restorative justice in this field, which I believe have not to yet been either fully explored or discussed in relation to such field. With this end in mind, the thesis is constituted by two parts of three chapters each. In the first part, the approach is mainly descriptive since the goal is that of setting the basis for further speculation. Throughout these chapters, the analysis firstly addresses from a conceptual point of view the notions of ‘corporate environmental crimes’ and ‘environmental victimhood’. Building on this, the research goes further by speculating around a normative model of punishment, and a model of sustainable Responsibility for restorative justice for this typology of crimes. This leads to the final discussion on the ‘transformative effects’ of restorative justice for corporate environmental ‘harm’ ex crimine vis-à-vis the role of corporations operating within Western societies’ regimes of economic governmentality.