The Political Economy of Environment in China and Russia

Session Submission Type: Full Paper Panel

Session Description

Political communities around the world are grappling with the impact of the currently dominant economic growth model on the natural environment. As scientists continue to call for the rapid reduction of carbon emissions in order to prevent potentially irreversible changes to the earth’s climate, political struggles have emerged and coalesced around different issues in different contexts around the world. Socialist and post-socialist societies have a well-known history of top-down modernisation projects that have had at times deleterious effects on the natural environment where they were enacted.

This panel explores how these high modernist development schemes are being re-articulated and re-fashioned in Eurasia today. To what extent and how are growth-oriented policies articulated and implemented in the context of environmental priorities in authoritarian and oligarchic democratic regimes? What types of critiques and mobilizations have emerged in response to these initiatives? How effective are bottom-up campaigns in support of environmental priorities such as clean air, fertile soil, and fresh water? How are both state developmental projects and environmental initiatives intertwined with increasingly globalized technological, financial, and activist knowledge networks?

The papers on this panel offer original empirical evidence from Russia and China to identify key development paradigms and environmental challenges, and discuss whether and how social actors are mobilising to raise awareness about these issues. The aim of the panel is to continue a discussion among scholars of the socialist/post-socialist region about the status of environmental politics and struggle at the current moment, and to illuminate what this region can teach us about environmental politics in other contexts.

Sub Unit

• DIVISION 13: The Politics of Communist and Former Communist Countries

Chair

• Lisa McIntosh Sundstrom University of British Columbia

Discussants

• Laura A. Henry Bowdoin College

• Irina Olimpieva CISR (Center for Independent Social Research)

Individual Presentations

• Do Protests Fall on Deaf Ears? Bureaucrats and Environmental Activism in China - Denise van der Kamp

• Redefining the Performance Legitimacy? Pollution and Popular Support in China - Narisong Huhe, University of Strathclyde; Jie Chen, James Madison University

• Green Dragon or Green Bear? Comparing Environmental Activism in China and Russia - Elizabeth Plantan, Harvard University

• The New Politics of Plenty; Russia's Agrifood Transformation and the Environment - Susanne A. Wengle, University of Notre Dame