Climate Crimes : Climate change and deforestation: a case-study of state-corporate crime in Peru

Abstract: During the last decades, climate change studies have been focusing more intensely on its anthopocenic essence, as the consequence of production and consumption patterns that require the intensive exploitation of the environment. In line with this school of thought, and new generations of studies on environmental crime, this work aims to present the environmentally and climate-related issues arising from land degradation in the Peruvian Amazon; focusing on those casual mechanisms developed from the collusion between Peruvian-economic policies and new private actors such as transnational corporations (TNCs). Relying on the assumption that: the processes moving the issue of climate change overcome the global space, and can be observed from regional, national or local point of view; this work's purpose is to analyze how a single country as Peru, currently considered of low ecological footprint, could, by means of the definition of national laws (environmentally and economic-related) burden climate change. The analysis focuses on a single case-study identified with the territory within the Northern Ucayali and Southern Loreto regions in Peru, and builds on the theory of state-corporate crime developed in the 1990s by Ronald C. Kramer and Raymond J. Michalowski to define the role of state-corporate relationships in the production of social harms. To show how this relationship is today shaping the globally spread issue of climate change, the analysis of the palm oil industry in Ucayali is presented as main example of a broader phenomenon of transgression and partnership between private and public spheres in Peru. In this optic, the purpose is to give further contributions to the studies of climate change as state-corporate crime, focusing on the analysis of those territory, as the Amazon, whose preservation has been identified as mayor tool against global warming and which is instead harmed by the relation between private and governments interests.