The price of prosperity. How regimes of permission emerged and enabled corporate environmental harm. A historical account of state corporate crime in the Netherlands

• In Event: The Criminology of Regulation: Special Issue of Regulation & Governance

Abstract

Both the regulatory governance and the state corporate crime literature examine interactions between governments and companies to understand corporate harms. Despite this shared substantive focus, both fields have increasingly diverged and failed to integrated each other’s insights (Almond and Van Erp 2020). One explanation is regulatory governance ’s usual focus on questions of institutional architecture” rather than causes and consequences of corporate harm: Another explanation is state corporate crime ’s predominant focus on singular events , so called ‘moments of rupture’ which impedes theorization and generalization. This paper answers to Almond and Van Erp’s (2020) call to integrate these perspectives, by analysing how so called regimes of permission emerged and developed over time and ultimately enabled corporate environmental harm. This question is answered by means of a historical analysis of two Dutch industrial facilities: ( Hoogovens/Tata Steel , a steel factory founded in 1918 and accused of emitting toxic substances that cause a higher prevalence of cancer in the proximity of the factory ; (2) Dupont de Nemours Chemours Dordrecht which has used the now infamous chemical substance PFOA (or C-8) - part of the PFAS a.k.a. ‘forever chemicals’-family – in its production processes since 1967, polluting the surrounding water, air and soil. This historical analysis of the two cases is based on government and corporate documents retrieved via archives, FOIA requests court case dockets and media publications since 1918/1967 Computational methods and qualitative content analysis are combined, going beyond specific ‘moments of rupture’, providing a longitudinal understanding of the historical, political-economic, institutional, and cultural dynamics that created these regimes of permission. In this way, this paper contributes to both corporate crime and regulatory governance literature, by analysing how certain institutional architectures have emerged and developed over time and thereby shedding light on the systemic drivers of corporate harms.

Authors

• Lieselot Bisschop, Erasmus University Rotterdam

• Karin van Wingerde, Erasmus University Rotterdam

• Sammie Verbeek, Erasmus School of Law