Abstract
The emerging Caspian Environment Programme anticipates extensive public participation and NGO involvement. Environmental NGOs in the former Soviet Union are no longer capable of carrying the burden anticipated for them by the Programme, and current NGO and civil society development programs in the former Soviet Union are not strengthening NGOs. For the Caspian Environment Programme’s public participation goals to be met alternatives to NGOs must be considered or a new approach to developing NGOs must be pioneered.
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References
Goncharov, Ivan (1988) Oblomov. Penguin Books, New York, p. 485.
Herring, Ronald J. and Erach Bharucha (1998). Embedded Capacities: India’s Compliance with International Environmental Accords, in Edith Brown Weiss and Harold K. Jacobson (eds.), Engaging Countries, MIT Press, Cambridge, pp. 395–435.
. See, e.g., Susskind, Lawrence E. (1994) Environmental Diplomacy: Negotiating More Effective Global Agreements. Oxford University Press, New York and Oxford; Wapner, Paul (1996) Environmental Activism and World Civic Politics. SUNY Press, Albany; Tolba, Mostafa K. with Iwona RummelBulska (1998) Global Environmental Diplomacy. MIT Press, Cambridge.
I employ the phrase ipse dixit to suggest that the influential force of donor recommendations for societal development in Central Asia is often founded in the name of the international organization issuing such recommendations rather than in an assessment of the logic and reasonableness of the recommendations themselves.
. See Addressing Transboundary Environmental Issues in the Caspian Environment Programme (Project Brief C-14), in Global Environment Facility: Project Proposals Submitted for Council Approval (GEF/C. 12/3) (1998, September 10), World Bank, Washington; World Bank (undated), Caspian Environment Programme. Available at: http://www.worldbank.org/html/extdr/rmc/guide/ecamna.htm.
These are too numerous to mention here, and any Internet search will yield several on-line directories produced with USAID, UN, and private funding. Also see Hall, Holly (1996, May 2) The Struggle of Russia’s Charities. Chronicle of Philanthropy 8 (14): 1, 14–18.
The exclusive concem of this paper is environmental NGOs. Other types of NGOs, specifically those not directly involved in watchdog activities, are faring better in Central Asia. For example, the best law school in Kazakhstan is the private non-profit Adilet Law School; mutual benefit associations of parents of disabled children or of minority groups are establishing strong constituent relations; and philanthropic research and artistic associations are in many cases thriving.
See, supra, note1.
For the application of these concepts to a wider Hegelian view of society, 1 am indebted to Robert Jackson for beginning this extension by applying these concepts to states and changing conceptions of sovereignty. See Jackson, Robert H. (1993) Quasi-States. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.
This substitution is borrowed from an analysis of conflicting modes of sovereignty. See Levy, Marc A. et al. (1995) Improving the Effectiveness of International Environmental Institutions, in Peter M. Haas et al. (eds.), Institutions for the Earth, MIT Press, Cambridge, pp. 397–426.
For the impact and penetration of Hegelian thought on Russian political science and sociology, see Walicki, Andrzej (1992). Legal Philosophies of Russian Liberalism. University of Notre Dame Press, Notre Dame and London. Generally, the term civil society was in active use before the October Revolution, and is not a recent introduction to Russian intellectual culture. This supports my stress on Hegel, but I do not mean to suggest that civil society as an important concept did not pre-date Hegel.
Local scholars have identified another applicable literary reference. Building on the Oblomov reference in this paper, Andrei Aranbaev of Turkmenistan has suggested that compilers of NGO directories are just like Chichikov in Gogol’s Dead Souls. Traveling from town to town, these compilers go to great lengths to acquire names, although in fact many of these names are of defunct organizations; nevertheless they have value because of the perverse incentives created by “negative” donor policies.
Stokke, Olav Shram (1997) Regimes as Governance Systems, in Oran R. Young (ed.), Global Governance, MIT Press, Cambridge, pp. 27–63.
The CCD establishes, inter alia,that affected Parties are “obligated” to “promote awareness and facilitate the participation of local populations, particularly women and youth, with the support of nongovernmental organizations, in efforts to combat desertification and mitigate the effects of drought.” Article 5(d). See CCD homepage, available at: http://www.unccd.ch.
Since the Caspian has yet to become a tug on the heartstrings of rich Western individual donors (despite Caspian seals, which would be the expected icons for fundraising in the West), the continued lack of Greenpeace and other major international NGO activity in the region is not surprising.
Talbott, Strobe (1994, January 24), Congressional Testimony, Foreign Operations Subcommittee of the Senate Appropriations Committee.
. See, generally, Fisher, Julie (1993) The Road from Rio. Praeger Publishers, Westport, CT; Fisher, Julie (1998) Nongovernments: NGOs and the Political Development of the Third World. Kumarian Press, West Hartford, CT.
Kuratov, S. and A. Salin. Gotovtes’, katastrofa zaplanirovana [Get Ready, A Catastrophe is Planned] (1990, October 18) Panorama (Alma-Ata, Kazakh SSR), p. 4.
Before the enactment of the 1990 laws on social associations, less than 10 individuals could form an association.
Exceptions to this assertion are a successful 1997 lawsuit filed by Biosphere (Leninogorsk, Kazakhstan) against their mayor’s granting of a construction license. Karmanov, Vladimir, A Matter of Law (1997, September I) Ecostan News 5(9). Available at: http://www.web.mit.edu/sts/leep/Ecostan/Ecostan509.html#law.But Biosphere is a comparatively old Kazakhstan NGO; this exception proves the rule that the new NGO ethic is divorced from action. The second exception is a 1998 lawsuit by Kazakhstan and Tajikistan NGOs against the US Fish & Wildlife Service. Sievers, Eric, Lawsuit Against the USF&WS (1998, May I) Ecostan News 6(5). Available at: http://www.web.mit.edu/sts/leep/Ecostan/Ecostan605.html#lawsuit. But here these NGOs merely agreed to be plaintiffs. Moreover, as of this writing, Dashkhovuz Ecological Guardians is currently facing the risk of being the defendant in a libel suit instigated by the government of Turkmenistan.
However, the financial gains of claiming otherwise are beginning to come to the attention of NGOs. In April 1999, a National Association of Kazakhstan Environmental NGOs formed in Temirtau with the goal of, inter alga,improving Kazakhstan implementation of international environmental conventions. Almost all of the founders were relative newcomers to the NGO community and lack any substantive organisational track records. In contrast, even among those rare NGOs that privilege environmental regimes, it is not clear that they have much chance for success. Kazakhstan’s Kaspii Tabigaty, for instance, is convinced that the best hope for the Caspian is to list the Northern Caspian as a World Heritage site. They clearly, and mistakenly, believe that such a listing would impose substantial restrictions on Russia and Kazakhstan with regard to hydrocarbon development, and they seem unaware that such a listing can only occur upon the petition of the states themselves. Moreover, Kazakhstan is currently prohibited from making such a petition under that convention’s rules since it is more than three years in arrears in its membership dues to UNESCO.
Local popular wisdom is that this is because the United States fears that an effective CEP will frustrate the activities of hydrocarbon development that trump expendable values such as democracy, rule of law, and the environment. Another view is simply that USAID suffers from coordination handicaps.
ISAR is not an acronym in the traditional sense. The official meaning of the acronym changes frequently as the organization re-invents itself to fit new USAID emphases (i.e. from citizen diplomacy, to environment, to women’s issues, to civil society).
ISAR proved its efficacy through an initial multi-million dollar USAID grant in 1993 for its Seeds of Democracy program. ISAR’s stated and contractual goals were to establish a grant giving program throughout the former Soviet Union, make this program sustainable, turn this program over to exclusive local control in 2–3 years, and otherwise obviate the need for foreign intermediary organizations. ISAR’s contumacious abandonment of efforts to comply with its contractual obligations (no effort was made to withdraw from the region or turn the program over) and its current ubiquitous appearance as the intermediary with NGOs in development projects attests to its level of success since 1993. It also attests to the level of trust USAID must have in the organization to operate symbolically instead of substantively. This typical USAID organizational history is also symptomatic of the degree to which proposal-based funding in the region is a perverse formality backed by very little substance or accountability, notwithstanding an abundance of prospective good intentions.
For example, the Ozone Regime began with the Vienna Convention, a framework convention; the Climate Change Regime has pursued a similar strategy; and, while a different kind of framework convention, the 1997 UN Convention on the Law of the Non-navigational Uses of International Watercourses, is also a framework convention through its anticipation of side “watercourse agreements” (Articles 3 and 4).
Connolly, Barbara (1996) Increments for the Earth: The Politics of Environmental Aid, in Robert O. Keohane and Marc A. Levy (eds.), Institutions for Environmental Aid, MIT Press, Cambridge, pp. 32765. Connolly herself points to Eastern European nuclear aid, biodiversity loss. and pollution of international waters as providing examples of such symbolic assistance. For case studies of the interactions between international environmental regimes and state government politics, see Economy, Elizabeth and Miranda A. Schreurs, (eds.) (1997), The Internationalization of Environmental Protection. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. For a critical view of donor influence in the Russian environmental community, see Fomichev, Sergei (1997) Raznotsvetnye zelyenye [Multicolored Greens]. TsODP/Tretii Put’, Moscow.
Editorial, Kto vinovat? [Who is Guilty?] (1998, November 4) Delovaya nedelya (Almaty, Kazakhstan). For a detailed examination of the history and sociology of the Russian environmental movement, which is applicable as well to Central Asia and Azerbaijan, and how this environmental movement can reclaim its societal relevance, see Yanitsky, Oleg (1996) Ekologicheskoe dvizhenie v Rossii [The Ecological Movement in Russia]. Russian Academy of Sciences, Moscow.
The Russian language legal term is organy obschestvennoi samodeyatel’nosti, and such associations include neighborhood associations, quasi-governmental rural councils, people’s brigades of every stripe, and similar mutual benefit formations. See Schiglik, A. I. (1988) Organy obschestvennoi samodeyatel’nosti kak forma sotsialisticheskoi demokratii [Agencies of Social Self-Activity as a Form of Socialist Democracy]. Nauka, Moscow.
However, the CEP would still leave itself open to indirect cultural imperialism. Since the very idea of NGOs is not opposed to the basic structure of any of the Caspian states, the CEP’S funding of NGOs does not necessarily leave the programme open to such criticism, but evaluations of which NGO projects warrant recognition do.
Both Kazakhstan and Russia have long-standing laws on consumer protection that have been used by consumer protection societies to further their goals (protecting individual consumers in individual cases) and make their efforts self-sustaining (through the sharing of awards between plaintiffs and these societies).
More specifically, such efforts would likely make society-specific arguments about selection of inappropriate discount rates, stress the unusual value of ecosystem services in arid and degraded areas, and expand the post-Soviet rhetoric of internalization of externalities.
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Sievers, E.W. (2000). How NGOs Abandoned Governance in the Caspian Region. In: Ascher, W., Mirovitskaya, N. (eds) The Caspian Sea: A Quest for Environmental Security. NATO Science Series, vol 67. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-011-4032-4_16
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