Environmental whistleblowers are the perfect candidates for rewards: they face daunting social and financial retaliation to bring to light the crimes that have the greatest global impact. Yet these efforts go unrewarded, discouraging potential whistleblowers and leading them to remain silent out of fear of retribution. If the script were flipped on whistleblowing, rewarding informants, and punishing bad actors, environmental crime could be proactively prevented rather than reactively mitigated. Yet, because of the misguided belief that reward laws discourage timely internal reporting, the international community is unwilling to use these tools.
A large share of environmental crime is committed by multinational corporations, many of which already have internal compliance structures in place. Incentives are given to whistleblowers whose reports result in a prosecution; functionally, this means whistleblowers who report to external authorities, or through both internal and external channels. Supporters of internal compliance programs may find this alarming, but this fear is baseless.
As a recent study by Professor Masaki Iwasaki, an associate professor at Seoul University, shows, the common criticisms that rewards will discourage employees from reporting through internal channels are untrue—especially for environmental whistleblowers. Iwasaki’s study, “Environmental Governance and Whistleblower Rewards: Balancing Prosocial Motivations...
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