Environmental conflict management: a comparative cross-cultural perspective of China and Russia

ABSTRACT

How are environmental conflicts managed in China and Russia? Both states are territorially large non-democracies affected by environmental degradation due to industrialisation and economic growth, and both are characterised by collectivist culture resulting from pronounced historical legacies and Communism. Our analysis of China indicates the important role played by local governments often supporting local people; and role of the negotiation between the central and the local governments. In contrast, in Russia local governments ally with businesses involved in environmental conflicts; or tend to support central government view on the conflict. However, the environmentalists’ movements in Russia are better connected to external (international) support. In contrast, China exhibits more isolation of environmental movements that are less influenced by Western environmentalism, if at all. The paper aspires to bring further insights in understanding of the public environmentalism and management of environmental conflicts in Eurasia.

KEYWORDS:

• China
• Russia
• Eurasia
• collectivist culture
• environmental conflicts
• governance
• communism
• post-communism

Acknowledgments

The authors are very grateful to two anonymous reviewers of this paper for their excellent comments and insights.

Disclosure conflicts of interest statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. Co-authors are listed alphabetically and they contributed equally to this paper.

2. However, even after the Enlargement of the EU in the 2000s, the new EU Member States still display different patterns of public opinion and behaviour which could be explained by historical legacies of Communism that survived the Global Financial Crisis 2008 (e.g. Armingeon & Guthmann, 2014; Arpino & Obydenkova, 2020; Obydenkova and Arpino2018; Beissinger & Kotkin, 2014)

3. This goes well beyond environmental conflicts and has been applied to political and economic development by Libman and Obydenkova (2014) who call it the ‘limiting factor’. Limiting factors emerge when there is a scarce and unique source that keeps an entire economy developing.

4. An analysis of ‘environmental authoritarianism’ by X. Li et al. (2019) is presented later in this section.

5. Information collected from the Environmental Justice Atlas (https://ejatlas.org/country/china).

6. Environmental Justice Atlas – https://ejatlas.org/country/russia

7. The public in Russia can be described as ‘traditionalist’ as it often resists changes, including those taking place in the countryside (Libman and Obydenkova2021).

8. This observation aligns with the findings of Mol (2009) on Russia’s environmental deinstitutionalisation.

9. However, it is fair to assume that a similar trend can be found in the case of China and its regions, and that this is due to the generally high level of corruption reported for China at a national level (however, the Corruption Perception Index still presents China as in a better situation than Russia).

Additional information

Funding

This research has been supported by the Interdisciplinary Scientific and Educational School of Moscow University ‘Preservation of the World Cultural and Historical Heritage’, by the Basic Research Program of the National Research University Higher School of Economics, and by the Konrad Adenauer Foundation (KAS).