A Green Criminological Approach to Environmental Victimisation and Reparation. A Case for Environmental Restorative Justice

This chapter approaches the notion of repairing from the multifold perspective of green criminology – a criminological perspective oriented towards opening up criminological paradigms to issues of environmental harms and crimes. First, we present some of the theoretical frameworks that seem to us best suited to support the interdisciplinary debate on recovery after disasters. Second, we highlight the importance of theoretical and empirical research for human and non-human environmental victims. Third, we make the case for a wider utilization of restorative justice and mediation-based approaches. Restorative justice – whose best-known tool is victim-offender mediation – is a model of justice characterized by the fact that it takes into consideration the negative consequences caused by a crime, that it promotes the regeneration of social bonds starting with the wounds caused by the crime and that it advocates that victims, offenders and communities take an active role in the search for possible solutions to repair the damage and heal the fractures caused by the deviant act. In particular, we show how environmental restorative justice approaches can help to overcome a purely ‘accusatory’ vision of repairing through taking into account other dimensions of repairing that are crucial to recovery after disaster. In so doing, we highlight innovative directions for future research that might contribute to collectively devising new ways of repairing environmental harm.