Environmental Deinstitutionalization in Russia

Abstract

Since the early 1990s a steadily growing social science literature has emerged on environmental reform. One of the core claims of the environmental reform school-of-thought is that environmental considerations and interests become institutionalized in societies (in different ways in their political, economic and socio-cultural domains). This article uses Russia as a case study for investigating whether the opposite of environmental institutionalization processes exist, labelling it environmental deinstitutionalization. Environmental deinstitutionalization takes place when institution building for furthering the processes of environmental reform is eroding and even reversing. Developments in Russia between 1991 and 2005 are indeed better characterized by environmental deinstitutionalization than by environmental reform. The article concludes with a more general assessment of the usefulness of the concept of environmental deinstitutionalization for empirical research, beyond the specific case of Russia.

Keywords:

• Ecological modernization
• environmental policy
• state bureaucracy
• NGOs
• decentralization
• institutionalization

Notes

These all refer to state environmental institutions. The same counts of course for private environmental institutions or civil society institutions. Alink and colleagues (2001) limit their deinstitutionalization analysis to only public institutions.

A 1998 Decree required a further budget cut of the federal and regional environmental administrations of 40% (OECD, 1999, p. 135). Until then, some 32,000 staff had been working for the State Committee for Environmental Protection at the various levels.

Federal Target Programs are key policy tools for implementing state policy by channeling finances to a limited number of delineated and prioritized activities. However, their implementation often lacks finances and coordination. The 19996–2000 FTP on Climate Change received only 3–4% of the required budget. And also the recent program ‘Energy and Natural Resources 2002–2010’ lacks adequate funding.

By law, 2,000,000 signatures are required to organize a referendum. Although 2,500,000 signatures were collected, only 1,900,000 were validated by the Russian authorities. Subsequently, the request for a referendum on the Committee on Environmental Protection was declined.

In this reorganization, state committees were abolished and three different federal organizations were introduced: ministries, with policy making power (including the making of legal regulations); agencies, with policy implementation tasks and responsibilities; and services, with mainly control and monitoring tasks. The latter two are normally subordinate to ministries (see Table 1).

E.g. the Law Concerning Wildlife (1995), Water Code (1995), Forest Code (1995), Law Concerning Protection of the Atmosphere (1999), Law Concerning Sanitary-Epidemiological Well-Being of the Population (1999).

Prior to 2000, the federal funds received 10% of all revenues from the pollution fees and charges. Regional funds received 30% and local level funds received 60% of all the charges. The regional and local ecological funds were one of the major sources for financing environmental protection at the local level, a factor 10–20 larger than the federal budget. But these Funds had to be filled with charges and fines collected at enterprises. Due to shortages of personal capacity, bribing, offsets, widespread exemptions from payment and non-payments throughout the 1990s, the budgets of the funds remained limited. Official data for the 1990s report over 2000 enterprises with exemption from payments and over 1000 with significant reductions (Kotov and Nikitina, 2002). The Federal Fund was abolished in 2000, but not the regional and local ones (World Bank, 2004).

The World Bank (2004, p. 39), based on WWF data, analyses a decrease of overall environmental expenditures (including private and public funds) from 2.7% of GDP in 1995 to 0.3% of GDP in 1999. This seems very unlikely; probably the last data is related to environmental investments (on average 15% of the expenditures).

In 1998, there existed 89 Regional Committees on Environmental Protection and 1397 District and Municipal Committees on Environmental Protection (OECD, 1999, p. 49). But over the last decade, the number of district and municipal committees has reduced significantly.

For instance, by the end of the 1990s and early 2000s the regional Environmental Protection Committee (the regional branch of the federal Ministry) controlled the regional ecofund in Samara, but in Nizhnii Novgorod the regional ecofund is under the responsibility of the Environmental Department of the regional administration.

The 20 billion USD Sakhalin II oil and gas exploitation project of the foreign owned (Shell, together with Mitsubishi and Mitsui) Sakhalin Energy Investment Company has been under environmental criticism from both international and local NGOs and the federal government. In 2006, the company was accused of major environmental threats and a license to produce was not granted due to failures to comply with local environmental standards. Once the foreign companies sold more than 50% of the shares to the state company Gazprom in December 2006, the Ministry of Natural Resources of the Russian Federation immediately announced its approval of the revised Environmental Action Plan, and gave a license to produce.