Ecological trends of political and electoral programs in Ukraine

Abstract

Changing the political elite in Ukraine as a result of the 2019 presidential and parliamentary elections raises interest in what will be the state's policy in various fields, including the environment. After all, the effectiveness of state environmental policy has not been achieved in previous years. Therefore, the purpose of the article is to determine the environmental trends of election (presidential, parliamentary) programs. In terms of research tasks, an attempt has been made to find out which of the types of environmental consciousness are the preferences of election programs; to trace the relationship between the environmental components of the programs of Presidential candidates and the political parties they represent; to find out whether the objectives of the state environmental policy of Ukraine for the period up to 2030 are taken into account in the election programs. The study was based on the environmental components of the election programs of the top 5 presidential candidates and the top 5 political parties that entered the parliament. The results of the analysis revealed that they were not filled enough: some did not contain such information or were formulated as a slogan of a single sentence. It is revealed that the content of election programs legitimizes the postmodern (harmonious) type of environmental consciousness. Only one program combines characteristics of all three types, including traditionalist and modernist (technocentric). It has been found that the environmental provisions of the programs of the presidential candidates and their political parties in the parliamentary elections are only partially correlated. The authors' special attention is focused on the consistency of election program provisions with the strategic goals of the state environmental policy. This aspect of the study shows that greening the worldview of the society as one of the five strategic goals of Ukraine's state environmental policy is not mentioned in the documents analyzed. Good environmental governance is only declared during a presidential campaign in one program regarding responsibility for environmental damage. The other two goals (sustainable development of natural resource potential, reduction of environmental risks and a safe environment) are fragmented. In both campaigns, greening of management decisions on socio-economic development is the most significant. The authors conclude about old trends of formal, ideologically unformed attitude of the political elite towards the environment in the election programs, the emergence of a business component as a relatively new trend in one of the election programs, and also express the opinion about the debate over the complex environmental policy and the new power of the new authorities management decisions in this area.