Environmental Deinstitutionalization in Russia

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.