State-organized crime and the killing of wolves in Norway

Ragnhild Sollund,David R Goyes

doi:10.1007/s12117-021-09420-3

Abstract

While scholars of state crime and organized crime have frequently explored the intersection of these fields with green criminology, for the most part they have not brought the two together as organized state criminality as a means to explore environmental destruction. Of the few explorations of organized state green crime that do exist, most do not embrace a non-speciesist perspective. In this article, we develop a non-speciesist theory of organized state green crime to explain the Norwegian state-licensed killing of wolves, a phenomenon that we analyze through the use of the concept ideological inertia. Our main argument is that the underlying cultural, political and economic interests that were prioritized up to the 1970s in Norway continue to have a counteracting effect on the protection of large carnivores, which the country committed to as a signatory to the Bern Convention.

Highlights

When the Law of Extinction of Predators and Protection of Other Wildlife was introduced in 1845 in Norway, one of the arguments in favor of the law was that shooting animals would be effective as firearms training for armed forces
We present Chambliss’s (1979) structural contradictions theory, supplementing it with the propositions of non-speciesist criminology (Beirne 1999)
We analyze internal and external elements that reveal the conflicting interests that the Norwegian government has to consider in its policy making. We argue that it is as result of this contradiction that the state engages in organized crime

Summary

Introduction

When the Law of Extinction of Predators and Protection of Other Wildlife was introduced in 1845 in Norway, one of the arguments in favor of the law was that shooting animals would be effective as firearms training for armed forces. We analyze internal and external elements that reveal the conflicting interests that the Norwegian government has to consider in its policy making We argue that it is as result of this contradiction that the state engages in organized crime. Sollund (2017b) has discussed whether the killing of wolves in Norway by private individuals was an instance of organized crime or “folk crime” She conceptualized the former as non-random cooperation between three or more persons in a specific period of time to commit an act punishable with more than three years’ imprisonment as per Norwegian Penal Law §79c and folk crime as acts of subsistence-driven contravention of conservationist policies. We embrace Chambliss’s (1989) theory as ideological inertia to indicate that in our case study the contradiction in institutional goals is created by the clash between traditional Norwegian social values and worldviews and current national practices and international commitments

Norwegian wildlife management

The Borgarting Court of Appeal

Internal and external tensions

Findings

Conclusion