Bond, DougWhiting, AlexClausse, Pierre-Jean2026-10-0920262026-10-092026Clausse, Pierre-Jean. 2026. Ecocide and Punishment: Toward a Global Framework for Criminal Accountability for Environmental Harm. Masters Thesis, Harvard University Division of Continuing Education.32905200https://dash.harvard.edu/handle/1/42759582The proliferation of environmental legislation since the 1972 Stockholm Declaration has not arrested the intensification of the triple planetary crisis: climate change, biodiversity loss, and pollution. This thesis examines the extent to which regional and international instruments contribute to the crystallization of ecocide as a principle of criminal accountability for environmental destruction. Employing a qualitative comparative documentary methodology and drawing on transnational legal process theory and the Finnemore-Sikkink norm lifecycle model, the study analyzes five instruments, the Council of Europe 2025 Convention on the Protection of the Environment through Criminal Law, the EU Environmental Crime Directive 2024/1203, the African Union Malabo Protocol, the Escazú Agreement, and the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court, and traces their transposition across five domestic jurisdictions: France, Germany, Belgium, Brazil, and Kenya. The analysis reveals three principal findings. First, regional instruments are functioning as norm laboratories that generate new legal architectures for the most serious forms of environmental harm. These instruments share a tendency to distinguish catastrophic environmental destruction from ordinary environmental offending, while differing over whether severity, geographic extent, duration, and irreversibility should operate cumulatively or through alternative limbs. Second, international organizations, transnational advocacy networks, and domestic legal innovators are operating as complementary drivers of norm diffusion, with the EU directive mechanism creating a distinctive forced-downloading dynamic that simultaneously transposes ecocide-like provisions across twenty-seven jurisdictions. Third, the ecocide norm is currently positioned at the transition between emergence and cascade in the norm lifecycle. The evidence points to convergence around the proposition that catastrophic environmental destruction warrants aggravated criminal treatment, but continued divergence over the precise threshold and mental element required for liability. This combination of normative agreement and doctrinal contestation is characteristic of a norm that has acquired substantial institutional traction without yet reaching a settled legal form. The thesis concludes that the emerging combination of national, regional, and international instruments constitutes the normative infrastructure of a growing environmental criminal regime, characterized by partial convergence on gravity, liability, and enforcement, but continued disagreement over threshold architecture and mens rea. As such, institutional enforcement capacity remains the principal obstacle to its consolidation. Directions for future research include the investment law-criminal law interface, temporal doctrines for cumulative ecocide, non-human victimhood, and empirical assessment of deterrent and expressive effects.application/pdfencomparative lawecocideenvironmental lawinternational criminal lawnorm diffusionRome StatuteInternational relationsInternational lawEnvironmental lawThesis or Dissertation2026-10-090000-0001-5763-3384