Corporate Criminal Responsibility for Environmental Crimes at a Global Level: a Socio-Legal Critique

We are living through an era of accelerating ecological collapse. Yet while the scientific consensus is clear, legal and political responses remain slow and fragmented. Nowhere is this more evident than in the struggle to prevent environmental harm, hold perpetrators accountable, and ensure deterrence. Criminal law, rooted in models of individual blame and direct causality, often proves ill-suited to address the slow, systemic, and collective nature of environmental degradation. This is especially true when corporate conduct is involved. Many of the most severe environmental harms stem not from isolated illegal acts, but from complex organizational practices, embedded in global value chains and legitimized by regulatory gaps. Understanding the models of criminal responsibility applied to such conduct—and their limits—is crucial for identifying where and how intervention is possible. Adopting a socio-legal perspective allows for a broader reading of these dynamics. It means situating criminal law within its political, economic, and institutional context, rather than treating it as a neutral or self-contained system. This approach not only interrogates how corporate environmental harm is currently addressed, but also what recent punitive trends reveal about the evolving role of criminal law in governing ecological crises.