Green Crime Governance: Psychological Drivers of Corporate Environmental Crime and Legal Frameworks for Sustainable Development Compliance

Abstract

Corporate environmental crime is one of the most important yet largely unexplored challenges to global sustainability. This review article provides an in-depth analysis of what could be the psychological factors that push corporations to environmental crime, how environmental crime can be enabled or prevented through a governance design and what legal instruments do exist to stop it. The article proposes an integrated approach to explaining the mechanism of the decisions to engage in corporate misconduct, drawing on criminological, behavioural psychological, organizational and environmental law concepts and literature. The review brings together the ongoing literature on green crime classification, behavioral decision models (the Fraud Triangle and Theory of Planned Behaviour), and the new concept of artificial intelligence in environmental governance. The article contrasts the main corporate environmental tragedies, such as the BP Deepwater Horizon, Volkswagen Dieselgate and the Bhopal Gas Disaster, and finds commonalities in the psychological lapses, governance failures and legal shortcomings. The Integrated Green Crime Governance Model provides a new conceptual paper that connects psychological dimensions, organisational culture, decision-making process, legal enforcement and sustainable development results. Research gaps which exist are identified, especially the lack of behavioral psychology and its integration into research on environmental crime, and the lack of models in environmental crime research based on a multidisciplinary approach between criminology, governance and sustainability. Policy recommendations include training in behavioral ethics, risk assessment based on psychological factors, separate ESG auditing and harmonization of the global rules.