Green Criminology: Its Foundation in Critical Criminology and the Way Forward
| Published date | 01 September 2021 |
| Author | RAGNHILD SOLLUND |
| Date | 01 September 2021 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1111/hojo.12421 |
The Howard Journal Vol60 No 3. September 2021 DOI: 10.1111/hojo.12421
ISSN 2059-1098, pp. 304–322
Green Criminology: Its Foundation in
Critical Criminology and the Way
Forward
RAGNHILD SOLLUND
Professor of Criminology, Department of Criminology and Sociology of Law,
University of Oslo, Norway
Abstract: This article outlines the field of critical criminology and how its development
was essential for the development of green criminology. Through a personal trajectory, I
use my experiences first as a student and later as Professor of Criminology at the Uni-
versity of Oslo as an entry point. I draw on my involvement with the European Group
for the Study of Deviance and Social Control to explore how critical criminology has in-
fluenced green critical criminology. Critical criminology, with its focus on the crimes of
the powerful, is concerned with victims of injustice, and a social harm approach was, I
argue, a necessary foundation for non-speciesist, green critical criminology. The article
concludes by elucidating the challenges for a green critical non-speciesist criminology,
which includes a presentation of my current research project, ‘Criminal justice, wildlife
conservation and animal rights in the Anthropocene – CRIMEANTHROP’.
Keywords: animal abuse; critical criminology; green criminology; non-
speciesist criminology; wildlife crime
Part One: Critical Criminology and the Emergence of Green
Criminology: My Personal Trajectory
In this article, I explore the development of green criminology and its
foundation in, and influences from, critical criminology. In the first part, I
start by using my own experiences as a student and scholar at the Univer-
sity of Oslo and with the European Group for the Study of Deviance and
Social Control. I use what I learned through these experiences as a frame-
work for the debate between conventional criminology and zemiology
(Hillyard et al. 2004) which is core to green criminology. In a way, reminis-
cence on my scholarly upbringing also resembles a semi-autoethnographic
intro-retrospective approach (for example, Sollund 2017a) to critical crim-
inology as a field and scholarly social environments pertaining to it. In
Part Two, I address the different branches of green criminology, and how
the definitions, conceptualisations, and literature in the field intersect with
304
C
2021 The Authors. The Howard Journal of Crime and Justice published by Howard League
and John Wiley & Sons Ltd
This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial
License, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is
properly cited and is not used for commercial purposes.
The Howard Journal Vol60 No 3. September 2021
ISSN 2059-1098, pp. 304–322
my personal dedication to green criminology, which was first inspired by
Beirne (1999) and Beirne and South (2007). I argue that while many schol-
ars had previously written on ‘green topics’, a great benefit came with nam-
ing the field as a different school of thought. In Part Three, I outline dif-
ferent subfields that have been encompassed under the umbrella of green
and conservation criminology, before discussing through a constructivist
approach, the essentialities of wording. The section finishes with a discus-
sion of the need for a criminology that is attentive to the emergent problems
of climate change, as well as to the specific challenges of a non-speciesist
criminology, including the study of wildlife trafficking. I argue that green
critical criminology is vital and urgent in confronting environmental crimes
and harms in a world characterised by a nature and extinction crisis.
It was not until I was well into my studies in criminology at the Univer-
sity of Oslo that I realised that not all criminology is critical. As a student
of criminology in the 1980s at the University of Oslo’s then Department of
Criminology and Penal Law, I took in lectures by Professors of Law Johs.
Andenæs and Anders Bratholm, Professors of Criminology Nils Christie
and Cecilie Høigård, and Professor of Sociology Thomas Mathiesen. We
learned about criminology and penal law, but Karl Marx was also on the
curriculum. I was astonished that it was possible to study such a revolu-
tionary discipline at university, this being a time of police repression and
violence and when the combination of youth and ‘hippie clothes’ could be
cause for arrest, as my own experience attests. We learned about police
brutality, the criminalisation of the poor, and oppressive prison systems.
The negative aspects of the prison system were not questioned, and the
curriculum covered the literature about the effects of imprisonment and
institutionalisation (Clemmer 1940; Goffman 1961; Mathiesen 2012; Sykes
2007), labelling (Becker 2003) and stigma theory (Goffman 2009).
I first fully realised that the criminology I was learning was called critical
criminology, not just criminology,when the department was due to move out
of the old Professor building in the University Park. In the debate about
where the department should be located, I learned that it was not located
on campus together with the Department of Sociology and other social
science institutes because its founding fathers wanted it housed with the
Faculty of Law. Nils Christie said that it was important we were there to
‘hold them by the ear’. Johs. Andenæs founded the department in 1954,
and Christie was employed as a docent and later became the first Professor
of Criminology (Lomell 2020).
The critical criminology we were taught was not like the mainstream
positivist criminology of the US. The divide between mainstream crimi-
nology and critical criminology persists, although much of North American
criminology is also critical. The divide is rooted in the tendencies of main-
stream criminology to (still) ‘exclude a diverse range of topics relevant to
studying harms and their consequences that ought otherwise to fit within
the discipline of criminology if criminology were not so narrowly defined
in the first place’ (Lynch and Stretesky 2014, p.4).
The criminology curriculum at the University of Oslo in the 1980s and
1990s was coloured by the research interests of our professors, as it is
305
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2021 The Authors. The Howard Journal of Crime and Justice published by Howard
League and John Wiley & Sons Ltd
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