ABSTRACT
This chapter aims to determine the place of environmental concern within Russia’s political-administrative system post-1991. It assesses Russia’s developing environmental legislation and policy base through a focus on official documents and associated literatures. The chapter examines Russia’s emerging environmental administrative framework with a particular emphasis placed on the changing nature of environmental protection infrastructure. It explores the relationship between government structures and non-governmental activities. Sustainable development is a wide-ranging concept with its roots in Anglo-US understandings of the relationship between society and nature. The ministerial designation given to environmental protection functions ensured that they played a relatively prominent role in Russian policy formulation during the first part of the 1990s. Since Putin’s accession to power in 2000, Russia’s environmental protection infrastructure has undergone further structural change. Russia inherited a reasonably extensive system of environmental governance from the Soviet period characterised by sensibilities that had overlap with those concretised at the international level during the Rio process of the 1990s.
