Environmental Justice and Sustainability in the Former Soviet Union (review)

Collective action puzzles provide useful frameworks for evaluating the role of environmental movements in the former Soviet region. These theoretical puzzles bear on such questions as: What motivates people to engage in public dissent? How do activists develop what Margaret Keck and Kathryn Sikkink in Activists beyond Borders call "common frames of meaning" to attract support? And when is activism effective? For example, environmental concerns spearheaded criticism of the Soviet system and contributed to its decline. Subsequent optimistic expectations that open economies would lead to progressive environmental policies gave way to pessimism by the 2000s. The late-Soviet period environmental movements seemed transformative but transient, as environmental activism fizzled in the early post-Soviet period. Until large protest rallies were held in Moscow and some other Russian cities in late 2011 and early 2012, scholarly assumptions about collective action in the region included the notions that apathy exists about environmental and social problems, civil societies are almost entirely absent, and a legal basis for natural resource policy reform does not exist. This volume edited by Julian Agyeman and Yelena Ogneva-Himmelberger provides a welcome departure from both simplified pessimistic as well as overly optimistic assumptions. Environmental Justice and Sustainability in the Former Soviet Union provides nuanced, complex views of the state of environmental politics in the post-Soviet space; it identifies motivations and frames for collective action. The book's contributors help explain why environmental justice and sustainability movements have emerged, identify when these two types of discourses have joined, and demonstrate why environmental movements have been successful in some cases and not in others. A key conclusion of several chapters is that success may be determined by how closely sustainability and justice are united in the frames and discourses used by environmental movements. In doing so, this volume fulfills its goal of beginning a dialogue about a new way to view environmental politics and social justice interacting in the 2010s: through the lens of "just sustainability."

The "just sustainability" concept guiding the volume's contributions is defined in the introduction as an agenda "which addresses 'the need to ensure a better quality of life for all, now and into the future, in a just and equitable manner, while living within the limits of supporting ecosystems'" (p. 3). In other words, "a sustainable society must also be a just society" and these could be politically compatible ideas, as discussed in Julian Agyeman, Robert D. Bullard, and Bob Evans, Just Sustainabilities: Development in an Unequal World (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2003), p. 3. The editors refer to the just sustainability concept as a "middle way" between the "brown" environmental justice discourse—that some groups are disproportionately affected by environmental harm or do not receive a proportional share of environmental goods— and the "green" sustainable development agenda. The former, Agyeman notes in an earlier work—Sustainable Communities and the Challenge of Environmental Justice (New York: New York University Press, 2005)—is a "bottom-up," grassroots community approach and the latter is a "top-down," international community agenda. Given the former Soviet Union's combination of serious environmental and health hazards, socioeconomic pressures, ethnocultural heterogeneity, and natural capital maldistribution, it is high time that environmental and justice issues are evaluated together in, and about, the region.

Agyeman's and Ogneva-Himmelberger's volume engages deeply in the changing and continuous political elements of post-Soviet environmental politics, such as rapid shifts in the political importance of equity, center-periphery, and interethnic group relations; the rise of interest group politics, civil society and state relations; and the complex new roles of international actors. The book embraces a variety of environmental justice concepts and presents multidisciplinary case studies. The editors do not falsely raise expectations about the representativeness of the cases they examinee, but they suggest the selections provide multiple perspectives on some of the many important issues of the last two decades. This is not a Russo-centric book, as volumes on...