Environmental Impact Assessment: Between Facilitating Public Contribution and Arbitrary Involvement of NGOs

This chapter studies Environmental Impact Assessments (EIA) in Russia. An EIA is a legal assessment process, where companies planning a project must evaluate its potential negative impact on the environment. Russian law stipulates mandatory negotiations between business, civil society and state actors during an EIA. The chapter examines how formally-prescribed collaborations during an EIA take place in practice. Thereby, particular attention is paid to the use of meta-governance tools by the state and the specific governance mix. The analysis is based on a qualitative design with six case studies of EIAs in the Krasnodar and Irkutsk regions. It reveals that the Russian authorities use a mix of hard and soft governance-tools in order to govern EIA. The legal framework in Russia involves relatively soft meta-governance tools. The empirical findings, however, demonstrate that EIAs are conducted very differently. One can identify three major patterns which vary significantly in the way the state applies meta-governance tools: softly dominated networks, strongly dominated networks, and mimicked networks.