A Sociological Account

Using the case study of the Czech Republic, the article examines the link between the development of environmental policy and the more general social and economic development of a post-communist society. The initially progressive arrangement of environmental agencies and procedures of the early 1990s, which were in tune with the concurrent development in the West, was abandoned due to the arrested expansion and diversification of the policy community. The ethos of environmental policy-making of the early 1990s, which was a consequence of the special circumstances of that period, could not be maintained in the following years as there was no sufficiently strong social group underpinning and advocating these changes. This is documented on the inability of journalists to grasp and further communicate complex environmental issues, and on the non-existence of a social stratum corresponding to the ‘new middle class’, from which Western environmental groups draw their support. Czech Sociological Review, 1999, Vol. 7 (No. 1: 37-50) 1. Environmental policy during the first half of the 1990s When the first (and the last) federal government body in the area of the environment was created in 1990 in what was then Czechoslovakia, it had a surprisingly progressive structure. It was not an ordinary ministry dealing with ‘a sector’, but a committee headed by a chairman (instead of a minister). This institutional arrangement reflected an idea that the environment should not be treated as a particular and separate sector of government policy, but rather that environmental considerations should penetrate all government policies. Its members were the ministers of the environment of both republics, deputy ministers of foreign affairs, finance and economy and also chairmen of committees of the environment of all three parliaments. This new federal authority focused mainly on legislative, strategic and international aspects of environmental policy. At the republic level, attempts were also made to overcome the legacy of the past and move environmental policy-making to a more advanced stage, certainly at least by means of what broadly resembled structural reorganisation [Weale 1992]. For instance, a comprehensive Czech environmental inspectorate was created, taking over inspections of water management and air pollution and thus covering waste management, forest protection and water management, and air pollution. The establishment of the Czech Ministry of the Environment in January 1990 signalled the end of the highly ineffective and sectorally divided old environmental protection arrangements. One of the major acts of the Ministry was the preparation of the ‘State Programme for the Protection of the Environment’. The programme set guidelines for relevant state institutions, a strategy for legisla*) Direct all correspondence to Petr Jehlička, Department of Social Geography and Regional Development, Faculty of Science, Charles University, Albertov 6, 128 43 Praha 2, phone +420 2 2195 2246, fax +420 2 296 025, e-mail [email protected] Czech Sociological Review, VII, (1/1999) 38 tive work and environmental policy development, and proposals for handling environmental research, education, regional environmental problems and international cooperation. Apart from short-term oriented ‘first aid’ programmes aimed at fast reduction of mainly air and water pollution in the form of ‘end-of-pipe’ solutions and clean-up projects, the ministries of the environment were also concerned with long-term considerations as documented by the emphasis placed on environmental education and research. While at a practical level the effort to embark on a more progressive approach to environmental policy foundered, at least at the level of official rhetoric, there were attempts to shift the focus from reduction of the amount of pollution towards the adoption of the principle of prevention. For instance, this principle was temporarily applied when competencies over land use planning and building code were transferred from the economic ministries to the Ministry of the Environment. It did not take long, however, before these powers were removed from the Ministry of the Environment and returned to their original holders. This short period of about two years at the beginning of the 1990s when the relationship between the environment and economy was not simply regarded as a zero-sum game, when attempts were made for integrated pollution control and when more advanced principles such as the principle of prevention were employed, was followed, starting June 1992 when the second general elections were held, by a new period during which many progressive features were abandoned. What was previously seen as a necessary first step to fundamental improvement of the state of the environment – clean-up and installation of end-of-pipe technologies – suddenly became the ultimate goal of pollution control policy. The Ministry of the Environment lost some of its newly gained competencies and the environment again became a discrete policy area. Selected problems once again came to represent environmental issues at the expense of others and were presented by the state authorities as indicators of an officially proclaimed overall improvement of the state of the environment. In the Czech context, an example of the former is air pollution, partly in response to the adverse effects of air pollution, in particular its links to the poor state of health of the population living in the most polluted areas. To document an almost anecdotal dimension of the U-turn of Czech environmental policy in the course of the first half of the 1990s it suffices to say that the notion of sustainable development was for a certain period completely banned from official government documents despite frequent references to the notion in Czech environmental legislation passed just a few years earlier. A remarkable feature of the first ‘enthusiastic’ period after 1989 (November 1989mid-1991; see Jehlička and Kára [1994] for more details) was the close relationship between state officials and activists from non-governmental environmental groups. The high degree of influence of environmental group activists on government’s environmental policies, certainly unusual by international standards, was embodied in 1990 in the founding of the Green Parliament that was initiated by the Czech Ministry of the Environment as its consultative body. The Green Parliament’s members were representatives of the majority of the existing environmental groups at that time. This effort to open political processes and enable public participation in the formulation of environmental policies sharply contrasts with the subsequent situation marked Petr Jehlička: The Development of Czech Environmental Policy 1990-1995 39 by a culture of secrecy and the effort to exclude citizens from environmental decisionmaking, which increasingly resembled practices of the communist regime. It was often the case that people who criticised the communist government for being responsible for environmental crisis in Czechoslovakia were also among the chief proponents of democracy. They were publicly denounced by the communist authorities and their views were portrayed by the controlled media as a threat to the progress of the communist society. By the mid-1990s, after six years of democratic government, the situation was, worryingly similar. As at the end of the 1980s, Czech environmentalists appeared in the middle of the 1990s on a list of subversive elements which was drawn up by the state intelligence services. In addition to the accusation of being a threat to the well-being of society, this time they were also deemed to pose a threat to democracy. Thus, while maintaining their views and goals, environmentalists in the eyes of the government and a certain section of the media went through a paradoxical transformation from being one of the major proponents of democracy to one of its major threats [Fagin and Jehlička 1997]. At an international level, the actions in the early 1990s of the Federal Committee chaired by Josef Vavroušek also differed markedly from the otherwise more common low-key mode of Czech foreign policy. The publication ‘Europe’s Environment. The Dobříš Assessment’ [Stanners and Bourdeau 1995] initiated by him and particularly the first pan-European conference of ministers of the environment held in Dobříš castle near Prague in 1991 were the most tangible results of his effort to achieve environmental improvement in the Czech Republic within the European framework. The goals of the conference were: “(...) to upgrade substantially the existing European environmental protection and restoration institutions, national as well as international, and to integrate them into a pan-European system of co-ordinated ‘mechanisms’ of environmental efforts at the continental level. (...) The second Dobříš objective was to develop, implement and then periodically to revise an environmental programme for Europe. (...) But the third objective was the least conventional and, in my view, the most important. I wanted the ministers to start to discuss human values and environmental ethics for sustainable development as the basis for such ways of life which can re-establish harmony between humankind and Nature.” [Vavroušek 1993] Hence it can be argued that at the beginning of the 1990s Czechoslovakia took an active part in the effort to shape environmental policies in Europe. Immediately after the fall of the old regime, one of the most important goals of Czechoslovakia and later the Czech Republic was membership of the EU. The Association Agreement was signed in 1991, which started the process of harmonisation of Czech laws and standards, including environmental legislation. In contrast to the early 1990s, in the subsequent years the Czech Republic no longer sought to be active in the arena of international environmental policy. Half a decade of harmonisation of the country’s environmental standards with the EU delivered an unexpected outcome. The Czech Republic’s environmental co-operation with the EU institutions as well as some consequences of domestic environmental policies came under criticism from the EU Commissioner for the Environment. The Czech Republic was warned that the environment could become a narrow point of integration to the EU. For instance, Czech authorities were criticised for their unwillingness to release information necessary for EU transboundary environmental projects [Čech 1997] and for a lack of attention to energy efficiency [Poláček 1996]. Czech Sociological Review, VII, (1/1999) 40 This stemmed from the fact that environmental harmonisation of the Czech legislation remained for the most part only at the level of ‘formal implementation’ (i.e. the incorporation of EU legislation into national law) as opposed to ‘practical implementation’ (i.e. the application of this national programme to effect the required changes in the behaviour of target groups). As was often the case with other policy areas, Czech environmental policy, both domestic and international, was to a great extent merely a limited formal imitation of Western (in this case EU) environmental policy. Formally identical or similar institutions and processes were not functional or acquired their own logic of operation, which was often sharply different from their Western models. While at least some government departments and agencies and policies rhetorically and formally embraced the EU policy line broadly defined as ecological modernisation, especially at international fora, domestically both the interpretative and action frames [Jachtenfuchs and Huber 1993] significantly differed from the meaning of this concept. The actual content of practical environmental measures remained firmly in the spirit of the reactive strategies of the 1970s. In the middle of the 1990s environmental problems were still basically seen as problems of pollution, which were to be resolved by scientific expertise, progress of technology and the installation of end-of-pipe devices. 2. Alternative accounts A standard explanation of the above-described developments employs concurrent broad domestic social and economic processes. On the one hand, it is argued that environmental issues slipped down the agenda due to a certain improvement of the state of the environment as a consequence of the slowdown of the economy. On the other hand, resultant serious economic problems are alleged to have led to social problems which replaced the environment as a major issue. On the basis of the findings of my research (over 30 interviews with politicians at central and local level, NGO activists, academics, civil servants and teachers; two questionnaires, each yielding more than 300 responses; a content analysis of a leading Czech daily; analysis of academic publications) I propose an alternative explanation. While certain peculiarities of the domestic political setting such as the highly centralised character of the Czech state or the intentional effort of state authorities to undermine the development of civil society contributed to fast abandonment of newly established institutions and practices once their proponents lost their position, I would argue that the underlying causes have deeper roots. As an observer of Czech environmental politics and policy in the early 1990s I was struck by the fact that the above-described progressive approach to environmental policy of the official state environmental agencies had no social underpinning. Superficially it seemed that there was, at least immediately after the demise of the old regime, strong environmental concern among the general public. It is now established in most academic accounts of the pre-1989 high environmental awareness of the Czech general public that the environment figured in the ecological discourse primarily as a tangible symbol of the wider ills of the socialist system [Holy, 1996]. However, even that genuine environmental concern as evidenced by results of various opinion polls did not go beyond people’s worries about effects of pollution on their health and/or about environmental degradation of a ‘local’ character directly experienced by them. Furthermore, according to all opinion polls conducted since 1991, people have become ever more satisfied with the state of the environment. Petr Jehlička: The Development of Czech Environmental Policy 1990-1995 41 These findings led me to focus on underlying factors of the ‘new politics of pollution’ [Weale 1992] of the 1980s in the West and draw comparisons with the Czech case. It was apparent that despite the effort of the first post-communist generation of environmental policy-makers to get wider segments of society involved, environmental regulation remained a matter for specialists and those few former environmental activists turned politicians who seized the opportunity offered by special circumstances of the immediate post-communist period. A discrepancy between the intentions and deeds of the first post-November 1989 group of environmental policy-makers in terms of fundamental environmental reform and a superficial character of environmental reporting in Czech mass media that did not correspond with what was actually going on at higher political levels raised a question of to what extent the process of the emergence of the ‘new politics of pollution’ as it occurred in the West in the 1980s could be applied to post-communist societies. My hypothesis was that the process of policy community expansion associated with general social trends, which was the crucial factor behind the transformation of pollution control policy in Western Europe by the early 1990s, reached only an early stage in the Czech Republic. 3. The underlying factors of the transformation of pollution control policies Weale argues that the transformation of pollution control policy was related to the expansion of environmental groups whose capability to change the character and functioning of the policy community depended on a number of more general social and economic changes: “Environmental groups have benefited from rising educational standards, both in terms of support, since the better educated frequently value environmental amenity highly, and in terms of providing activists and a constituency that are scientifically and socially literate. The ability to challenge the policy decisions of existing elites in part depended upon showing technical competence, and rising educational standards have supplied new generations of supporters able to handle complex bodies of information. A related trend has been the development of specialist journalists in science and environmental affairs who have been able to explain technical issues in an accessible way.” [Weale 1992] Drawing on this line of argument in my own research I set out to examine to what extent these conditions for the development of new politics of pollution were in place in the Czech Republic in the late 1980s and early 1990s. I pursued the following three interrelated directions of research: 1. Examination of environmental discourse in the media at the beginning of the 1990s; 2. Analysis of the potential of the academic sphere for stimulating the process of learning; 3. Opportunities/constraints for learning stemming from the (under)development of civil society. 4. Environmental discourse in the media The empirical basis of the content analysis was the entire environmental coverage in the Czech quality daily with the largest circulation – Mladá fronta – between 1 November 1988 and 31 October 1992. The communist period was included in the analysis as one of my major aims was to observe how impacts of transition from one political system to another on a broad area of environmental issues was reflected in environmental coverage in the most popular Czech daily. I wished to see how this diverged from the standard of Czech Sociological Review, VII, (1/1999) 42 the communist period and to what extent the environmental coverage no longer subjected to censorship converged with western development in this field. The result of my analysis was a list of environmental articles produced for each month containing the date, the headline of an article, its main subject or issue focus expressed in several key words, journalist genre, the length of an article measured in columns, an author, the originator (if distinguishable) of an article and its geographical location in the case of the news’s foreign reference. Articles were classified according to five different genres: news; note; comment; interview and analysis; and according to 34 issue areas. While it needs to be recognised that the various issue areas could not often be entirely separated, they were an indicator of the primacy focus or emphasis of coverage. The extensive environmental coverage in Mladá fronta in the last period of communist rule in Czechoslovakia, documented in my research on the last 12 months of the old regime, and the subsequent wave of environmental reporting revealing the legacy of communism, did not produce any long-lasting concern for the environment. However, it directed attention to certain issues, such as air pollution, and presumably prompted politicians to act – to adopt new laws addressing the problem. But the proposed solution (installations of end-of-pipe technology) was fully in line with measures used in dealing with any other problems. Articles whose arguments would challenge traditional and wellestablished modes of behaviour and social norms, scarcely appeared in the newspaper. The outburst of environmental coverage in the last phase of the old rule could therefore be best interpreted as an indirect criticism of the communist regime itself. The claim that the extensive environmental coverage was partly meant to draw attention to deficiencies of the political system rather than an expression of the genuine environmental concern of the journalists and the society as a whole, is supported by two facts. First, after the demise of the communist regime, environmental coverage shrank relatively quickly. Society at large, as well as the media, were losing interest in the environment, while at the same time these issues were far from being resolved. Second, many new environmental problems brought about by the new conditions of post-communist economic and social life passed unreported in the media including Mladá fronta. Analysing an uneven distribution of variable problems in the mass media over time makes sense because, as Hansen [1993] pointed out, it is to do with the way in which elaboration and maintenance of the problems in public arenas offer insights into the power of different groupings in society to define what should be the focus of public concern, action, and ultimately, resource allocation. And this is precisely what the content analysis of Mladá fronta’s environmental coverage enabled me to understand. The analysis of the Czech daily provided an insight into how environmental problems were actually presented by those who had access to news creation. One of the findings of my analysis of environmental coverage in Mladá fronta was a conspicuous lack of news either created or originating outside the fora of conventional and official politics and science. The views of ‘counterexperts’ and activists of environmental groups, who in Western environmental coverage often function as agents of alternative views, was for most of the time of the analysis almost entirely lacking in the coverage. Environmental groups were active in Czechoslovakia, but they were rather small and therefore one likely reason for the absence of their voice in the newspaper was a lack of political power to get access to the media and to make their voice heard. Petr Jehlička: The Development of Czech Environmental Policy 1990-1995 43 One of the most peculiar features of Mladá fronta’s environmental coverage was the dominance of domestic issues throughout the whole period under scrutiny. The annual share of domestic environmental coverage in total environmental coverage never dropped below 72 per cent and was most of the time over 80 per cent. In contrast, the combined categories of international and global environmental coverage only once exceeded 20 per cent and for most of the period made up only over 10 per cent. Lacey and Longman [1993] conducted a content analysis of the British press whose period under scrutiny considerably coincided with my analysis of Mladá fronta. For instance, during these 30 months The Guardian published 504 articles containing reference to the ‘greenhouse effect’ and 436 articles mentioning the expression ‘global warming’.1 The same figures related to The Times’s coverage of these two phrases were 431 and 392. On the other hand, Mladá fronta published in the same period 16 articles, whose main thrust was global warming. A pro-active approach to the international environmental co-operation of the postcommunist administration passed unnoticed by the media and Mladá fronta was no exception in this respect. To a certain extent, such an approach by the media was maintained as regards the first pan-European conference of ministers of the environment convened and organised by the Czechoslovak government in June 1991. If an attempt at being in the forefront of the European environmental diplomacy hardly achieved recognition in Mladá fronta, it was not utterly unexpected that the UN Conference on Environment and Development in 1992 received very poor coverage too.