Environmental Policy Reform in the Post-communist Czech Republic: The Case of Air Pollution

Abstract

THE DEVELOPMENT OF ENVIRONMENTAL POLICY in Western countries during the past three decades is a remarkable story of policy change driven by public concern. Environmental activists and Green parties have pushed environmental issues onto national government agendas in the face of stiff opposition from economic interests. In 1989 the world witnessed a new wave of environmental protest in East Central Europe (ECE). As environmental groups rallied public opposition to the region's failing communist regimes, many Western analysts predicted that grassroots activism would drive environmental policy reform in post-communist countries.2 This prediction turned out to be unfounded. Across the region, public concern about the environment plummeted after 1989 as the hardships of transition to a market economy took centre stage. Environmental policy came to be developed largely in isolation from societal pressures. In this article I examine the dynamics and results of environmental policy reform in the Czech Republic between 1989 and 1998. The first section analyses the changing nature of the driving forces behind environmental policy reform in the post-communist Czech Republic. In the late 1980s the Czech lands (then part of the former Czechoslovakia) had some of the most severe environmental problems in ECE, as well as one of the region's most significant grassroots environmental opposition movements. The prominence of environmental themes during the 'Velvet Revolution' of November 1989 resulted in the creation of a powerful Czech Environment Ministry headed by former 'green dissidents'. Yet the ministry's efforts to forge a more inclusive environmental policy process were soon undermined by a rapid and sustained decline in popular concern with the environment, attributable chiefly to the function of environmental protest in 1989 as an outlet for broader