"How is this Problem Solved Abroad?" Drawing on Capitalist Experience to Foster Technocratic Environmentalism in Soviet Water Management, 1957-1975

• In Event: Globalizing the Soviet Environment: East-West Circulations of Knowledge and Expertise on Nature, 1957-1991

Abstract

At the end of the 1950s the revival of academic exchanges between the USSR and the West gave a group of Soviet scholars the opportunity to advocate a crucial shift in environmental management and protection institutions. They promoted the “integrated use” paradigm for water resources, thus contributing to its triumph in the international sphere as a leading global concept. Taking part to major Soviet water controversies (lake Baikal, Siberian river diversion project) at Academy of Sciences or governmental internal meetings, they began to foster a technocratic environmentalism in water management and to appeal to a convergence with capitalist countries on this field.

Author

• Laurent Coumel, Research Center for Russian, Caucasian and Central European Studies (France)