DEMOCRACY AND THE ENVIRONMENT IN RUSSIA

Since 1988, the Russian Federation has required that laws, plans, programs and all kind of projects undergo an environmental assessment. A mandatory component of the EIA in Russia is public participation. In this paper different case studies are used to find out to what extent public could influence environmental decision making processes from the early eighties until 2002. The cases selected include several where the public was passive or where it had limited activities, but also some where the participation was strong and projects were improved or stopped. As far as these case studies highlighted, the civil society in Russia can be described as an organized and sometimes strong factor in the approval process. The behaviour displayed by decision-makers, however, revealed at times a remarkable democratic deficit.