Comparative Environmental Regulation in the United States and Russia (review)

When are states likely to introduce flexible environmental policies? Lada Kochtcheeva offers a historical institutionalist analysis of air and water regulation in the United States and Russia to address this question. Kochtcheeva contributes to the literature on comparative environmental policy by juxtaposing two states that are often considered “exceptional” in some way and demonstrating the common features that allow for (or fail to allow for) experimentation with incentive-based instruments for controlling pollution. These similarities, Kochtcheeva argues, hold lessons for all states—developed, transitional, and developing. While the US case has been well studied, Kochtcheeva offers a thorough overview of Russian environmental regulation from post-WWII to the present, drawing upon primary documents in Russian, and revealing a fascinating history that has been neglected in comparative analysis. The book is an impressive achievement, but also somewhat limited, as the focus on institutions inadvertently seems to de-emphasize the political, economic, and ideological context that inspired the creation of these critical agencies and policies.

Kochtcheeva’s stated intention is to go beyond a narrow and decontextualized focus on the merits of various flexible instruments, their costs and benefits and likely effectiveness. Instead, she examines the institutional context for the construction of environmental policy. Her comparative analysis identifies several important factors that create favorable conditions for the shift from command and control to more flexible regulatory approaches. These include the presence of an independent and centralized environmental agency, the initiative and capacity of the regulatory body (as opposed to the legislative branch), compatibility between new approaches and past regulations that allows for incremental change, the creation of effective systems of accountability, and past failure to achieve environmental goals with direct regulation alone. In the US case, the EPA has taken a leadership role in developing innovative regulatory tools and has significant capacity to implement new measures, while in the Soviet Union, and later in Russia, the fragmentation of responsibility for environmental oversight across ministries and levels of government has hampered experimentation and resulted in fewer flexible approaches, particularly in water policy.

This institutionalist analysis is plausible and often quite compelling. The strategy of within-country comparisons highlights how early regulatory schemes may facilitate or block experimentation with incentive-based measures, even within a single state. Environmental regulation thus develops in a path-dependent fashion where, for example, performance-based standards rather than technology requirements lend themselves more readily to flexible instruments. This close scrutiny of institutions can obscure broader political and economic factors that shape regulatory choices, however, factors that Kochtcheeva acknowledges, but that are buried in the case material and only partially developed near the end of the book. Broadening the analysis beyond insights about centralized versus dispersed policy authority has the potential to generate both new insights and new questions for the comparative policy literature.

Comparative policy studies during the Cold War frequently relied heavily and simplistically on ideological rhetoric to account for puzzling differences across states. Contemporary scholarship transcends this kind of reductionism, but ideally without losing sight of the role of ideology and regime type. Different regimes have different standards of fairness and accountability and different sources of authority and legitimacy. These differences were stark in the United States and the Soviet Union prior to the early 1990s, yet the book fails to give the reader a clear sense of Soviet political and economic arrangements beyond environmental regulation, with only scattered references to the planned economy and the state’s monopoly on political and economic resources, not systematically integrated into the analysis. The argument also does not explicitly address the dramatic upheaval—ideological, institutional, and otherwise—that accompanied the collapse of the Soviet system and disintegration of the USSR in 1991. If only to reinforce that the similarity in institutional patterns that she identifies is remarkable, Kochtcheeva’s study could benefit from greater attention to different climates for policy-making. Readers unfamiliar with the Soviet and Russian cases would also walk away with a richer sense of the varied pressures on environmental policy making...