Submission to the Foreign Affairs, Defence and Trade Committee on the complex relationship between crime and development and the importance of criminological research for achieving the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDG)

Our submission draws primarily from our on-going research on 1) international police capacity building, 2) global crime governance, 3) gender-based violence, and 4) environmental crime. This work was recently published in an article titled ‘Criminology and the UN Sustainable Development Goals’ that was published by three of the contributors in the British Journal of Criminology in 2017. This inquiry represents an important opportunity to examine the complex relationship between crime and development in the context of the SDG. It also presents an opportunity to highlight how ongoing research on crime, justice and security in Australia can support the Australian Government and governments throughout the Indo-Pacific region in implementing this agenda. With this submission, we stress that crime, broadly defined, is both an obstacle to development and a consequence of development. Understanding this complex relationship is essential for creating conditions that are necessary for meeting the UN sustainable development targets and for developing resilience to the instabilities resulting from uneven development and climate change throughout the Indo-Pacific region.