Russia in Transition Obstacles to Environmental Protection

Waxing power, waning pollution: The effect of COVID-19 on Russian environmental policymaking

“…As Henry and Douhovnikoff (2008:439) noted, “environmental protection gained further stature following the collapse of the Soviet system. One of the first laws passed by the newly independent Russian Federation was the 1991 Federal Act on the Protection of the Natural Environment… the Ministry of the Environment [was created and] Russia also progressively, if mostly rhetorically, committed itself to the principle of sustainable development.” While this represented the height of power for Russian environmental policy at the federal level ( Glushenkova 1999 ), there was a corresponding lack of capacity and funding, meaning the national environmental approach changed to stress “not improvement of the environmental situation but, rather, its stabilization and conservation of that which has not yet been destroyed” ( Kotov and Nikitina 1993 :13). As part of this approach, the Act on Protection also empowered citizens and activists in the environmental sphere and gave them legal protections, in the hopes of deputizing them as stewards of the local environment ( Bond and Sagers 1992 ).…”

“…Given the slow progress of economic institutional reform – i.e., the little progress made on property rights – such a de facto decentralization could have gone seriously awry in such a dysfunctional institutional environment ( Kotov and Nikitina 1993 ); in particular, it was surmised that regional governors and local authorities were even less accountable than Moscow and much more corrupt ( Glushenkova 1999 ), while Bahry (2005) noted that the center's inability to provide basic institutions meant that regions had little sovereignty to develop economic bases independent of Moscow. But despite this state of affairs, the tentative decentralization of environmental functions appeared to be fairly successful in tough circumstances ( Kotov and Nikitina 2002 ), with local administrations “being the only institutions which… perform environmental protection activities regionally and local” ( Glushenkova 1999 :161).…”

“…The first, in line with the Coase (1960) Theorem, is a pervasive lack of property rights across Russia ( Gans-Morse 2017 ), a situation which has created disincentives for environmental protection at the firm and individual level. Much as during Soviet times, the commons “were no one's property, they were under no one's protection” ( Kotov and Nikitina 1993 :12–13). At the same time, the tenuous nature of property rights in the country has allowed for a cozy alliance between business and politicians regarding environmental regulation, halting any real progress in market-based industrial restructuring after the Soviet Union, while entrenching large state-owned companies in more pollution-intensive industries ( Thorton 2009 ).…”

“…At the same time, the tenuous nature of property rights in the country has allowed for a cozy alliance between business and politicians regarding environmental regulation, halting any real progress in market-based industrial restructuring after the Soviet Union, while entrenching large state-owned companies in more pollution-intensive industries ( Thorton 2009 ). Practically, this has resulted in “all types of costs associated with environmental protection… viewed as drains upon economic growth” ( Kotov and Nikitina 1993 :13), with government able to override individual preferences for cleaner air and water simply by holding the commanding heights of the economy. 2…”

Drivers for adopting environmental management systems in the post-Soviet mining industry

“…Although environmental protection and control were never entirely absent from the Soviet-Russian political context (Weiner 2000), the profile of environmental policy was enhanced as the Russian government in 1991 upgraded the previous State Committee of Environmental Protection and Natural Resources into a ministry and enacted the Law on the Protection of the Environment (Kotov and Nikitina 1993). Two important elements were introduced in these changes.…”