Beastly Business: Examining the illegal trade in Bears, Eels and Songbirds was a two year project which ran from 2021 to 2023 and funded by a £859,000 UK Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) grant. The project team are still producing outputs from the research – you can check for the latest news, events and writing on the News Page

We had a lovely website with lots of cool visuals, but alas as our funding ran out we had to shift to this googlesite, which isn't as visually engaging. 

IWT is a policy priority for global institutions, donors and NGOs. However, illegal trade in European species has been overlooked even though Europe is an important site of production, consumption, and transit.

This project directly addressed this gap in knowledge, and in doing so delivered new empirical data and a novel analytical framework that synthesised the strengths of two key approaches – political ecology and green criminology. Our key paper on this can be read here.