ABSTRACT
Since the early 1990s a complex structure of regional environmental governance has been developed for Northwest Russia that has included hundreds of projects to support Russian environmental capacities. International environmental cooperation in the region is a product of many – in most cases separate – international political initiatives by different political actors in the region that reflect their various environmental, economic and political interests in Northwest Russia and the Russian Federation in general. However, at the same time, Russian local, regional and national capacities to tackle environmental issues may well be lost due to economic constraints, continuous administrative reforms and a lack of commitment to sustainable development. These Russian domestic developments undermine international efforts and account in part for the modest performance of international cooperation in the region. In this chapter, the two parallel developments – international and domestic – are studied from the perspective of regional environmental governance, path dependency and environmental capacity-building. The emerging path in international environmental cooperation establishes the region as an object of action, not as an environmental actor itself. The domestic developments in Russian environmental policy have also led to diminished capacities for environmental action in the region. Path dependency in Russian environmental management constrains the international environmental cooperation in the region.
