“…These studies highlight a significant gap in the existing research (Börzel & Buzogány, 2019). The existing studies focus on issues such as the adaptation of environmental legislation within the EU (Rehbinder & Stewart, 2017), the role of environmental principles in the EU's environmental policy (Macrory & Thornton, 2017), the environmental responsibility of the EU Member States and candidate countries (Palevic et al, 2019), the role of criminal law in ensuring environmental protection (Karpuntsov & Veresha, 2022;Kazić, 2018;Veresha, 2016), qualification and jurisdiction applicable to environmental crimes (Vinogradova, 2017), compliance with the EU's environmental legislation (Bondarouk & Mastenbroek, 2017;Hedemann-Robinson, 2015), the role of criminal law instruments (Alua et al, 2023), the implementation of the European Green Deal in the Eastern Partnership countries (Tsebenko et al, 2023), compliance with the EU's environmental law (Börzel & Buzogány, 2019), and the theoretical and methodological underpinnings of environmental policy research (Leipold et al, 2019). Environmental populism has attracted significant research interest in recent years.…”