Networks, network change, and environmental protection: Soviet and post-Soviet policies toward Lake Baikal (Russia)

This dissertation seeks to explain two apparent contradictions in Soviet and Russian environmental policy. Why did the same Soviet government that so heavily contaminated its air, water, and soil with agro-industrial pollutants also create and maintain an extensive system of strictly protected nature preserves? Why has post-Soviet Russia increasingly enacted measures for both pollution control and nature conservation, while largely failing to implement either? How did the barrier between success and failure in environmental policy change from a horizontal one between issue areas to a vertical one between levels of policy making?; The dissertation uses a policy-network framework to explain the outcomes of environmentalists' attempts to safeguard Siberia's "blue pearl," Lake Baikal. The systemic changes of perestroika and the post-Soviet transition presented opportunities and constraints to two existing policy networks. These allowed the environmental network to expand its influence in enacting central policies, while curtailing the center's ability to control policy implementation in the regions, where the agro-industrial production networks continued to hold sway. This accounts for the fate of the several protected territories surrounding Lake Baikal and of the pulp-and-paper mill that was built on the lakeshore in the 1960s and continues to operate, despite a series of federal resolutions calling for its closure.; This study shows that environmental performance varied significantly within the USSR, and that systemic-level variables alone cannot fully account for that performance. It shows how actors change institutions (in this case, networks) in response to external changes, and how these institutional changes in turn affect policy outcomes. It suggests taking a more differentiated approach to "state capacity," seeing it as the result of resource dependencies linking central policy makers to other political "stakeholders."...