Exploring illegal environmental behaviour

  "Environmental waste" by Paul Morris.
Principal Investigator: Dr Freya St. John
Project dates: January 2013 – September 2013
Funding: Defra & Environment Agency

 

This government is committed to being the greenest ever. Whilst good progress has been made over the last decade to reduce the levels of waste sent to landfill, illegal waste disposal remains a concern. In an attempt to tackle illegal waste crimes (and other environmental crimes) the government has pledged to ensure that enforcement bodies have sufficient powers to tackle environmental crimes. This approach includes increasing powers to seize vehicles, and in some instances has increased levels penalties available to courts. However, little attention has been given to exploring the myriad drivers of environmental crimes with the aim of designing interventions aimed at influencing human behaviour to improve compliance.

Increasing our understanding of drivers of criminal behaviour improves our ability to critically review existing regulatory and enforcement interventions and approaches. Critically, it enables the development of recommendations which address the underlying causes of criminal behaviour, rather than the symptoms.

This project will use specialised methods for investigating sensitive topics to estimate the proportion of people in England involved in environmental crimes such as fly-tipping. Further, in order to provide information that can contribute towards the design of interventions to improve compliance, drivers of criminal behaviour (e.g. social norms, knowledge of rules, availability of required resources, economic incentives) will also be explored.

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