Restorative justice as a response to environmental crime

Abstract

The central problem of this research is the ineffectiveness of traditional criminal law in addressing environmental crime. This punishment-centered model reveals its limitations by relegating damage reparation, prevention, and guarantees of non-repetition to the background. Given this insufficiency, the following questions arise: Is the new framework for restorative justice in Spain an effective way to achieve meaningful reparation for environmental damage? Furthermore, does this model allow for the integration of a plurality of interests and address the structural causes of corporate environmental crime? The main objective is to explore the applicability of restorative justice, recently regulated in the 9^th Additional Provision of the Spanish Criminal Procedure Act, to environmental offenses. The working hypothesis is that the new Spanish criminal regulations offer a strategic opportunity for restorative justice to achieve more effective, flexible, participatory, and sustainable solutions in the field of environmental crime compared to a merely punitive intervention. The methodology is based on a dogmatic and legal-comparative analysis, employing an analytical-functional approach to contrast the traditional punitivist paradigm with restorative justice. The study focuses on the new regulatory framework, using the responsiveness of both models to the specificity of environmental damage and their efficacy in the effective restoration of the environment as analytical criteria.