Institutional Assessment of Environmentally Oriented Subsoil Use

Abstract

The article solves two relevant problems related to the implementation of the institutional assessment of environmentally oriented subsoil use: 1) the definition of the ‘environmental security’ and 2) the determination of the development level of institutional bases of environmentally oriented subsoil use including the institutional capacity of subsoil use and institutional capacity of environmental security. The article shows an analysis of the existing definitions of “environmental security†and offers the own one. Despite the significant national and foreign experience in the institutional capacity assessment of various processes, there are still some difficulties in defining and measuring the institutional capacity. We eliminate these difficulties by employing 1) original factors, previously identified, and the content of the “institutional capacity†term; 2) quality characteristics for the institutional capacity assessment of the process regulated at the macroeconomic level, and 3) a consistent methodological tool for the institutional assessment of environmentally oriented subsoil use. The study is based on the hypothesis of the necessity of legal and discreet state intervention in the process of subsoil use. Therefore, we identify the evaluation indicator of state regulation in the environmentally oriented subsoil use as the institutional capacity level calculated by using the fuzzy-set theory. As a result, the institutional capacity levels of the environmentally oriented subsoil use have been defined for both the transport corridor «Arctic-Central Asia» and for the countries composing it. The obtained values of the assessment of institutional capacity levels of the environmentally oriented subsoil use can serve as a basis for identifying the vector of its increase.