Illegal Logging and Anti-Money Laundering in the Asia Pacific Region: Diagnosing Systemic Vulnerabilities that Impede Detection and Enforcement

Illegal logging generates over US$50 billion in proceeds annually, engenders mass deforestation, and incentivises human rights abuses. As a result, frontline environmental defenders, states, and the international law enforcement community, have used anti-money laundering mechanisms over the past decade to target the transnational structures that enable the extraction, movement, and conversion of illegal logs. Despite this significant investment, research in the Asia-Pacific indicates this is not changing the behaviour of illegal loggers or disrupting the flow of illicit value. Employing an abductive research design this study will investigate this surprising finding emerging from practice. In line with abductive principals, AML practitioners will be incorporated into the study at an early stage using focus groups to formulate hypotheses that explain the above surprising finding. Focus group results will be used to generate explanatory hypotheses, complimented by the use of theoretical concepts drawn from the nodal governance and security network literature. These explanatory hypotheses will then be tested through diagnostic fieldwork focusing on the network of stakeholders involved in both monitoring illegal logging flows emerging out of Papua New Guinea and contributing to AML mechanisms. The results will be analysed using thematic and social network analysis. It is expected that the findings will make a significant contribution to the literature on environmental crime and security networks. In addition, the findings will lead to diagnostic recommendations that can help support future capacity building and strengthening of AML measures deployed in the Asia Pacific to combat illegal logging.