Transition of biodiversity governance in former USSR: changes, legacy effects and the implications

The main research objective is to understand how biodiversity governance in Belarus, Russia and Ukraine was changing over the past two decades, and what that entailed for landscape and biodiversity conservation and for local communities. Specific objectives and issues of concern include understanding the role of institutional legacies in the development and implementation of biodiversity conservation policies, effectiveness of democratic and market-based mechanisms vs. top-down regulation, instances of “non-governance”, mapping of institutional set-ups and their spatial properties, and comparative adaptability of biodiversity governance systems to global environmental change.

Some of these topics are comprehensively discussed in the international literature, however most papers are based on examples from industrialised democracies or indigenous communities, while a large portion of the world belongs to neither of those. The issue of mapping and spatial analysis of resource governance systems is still new and, apparently, it is of high potential interest to the international readership as well as the region of Eastern Europe, which is still underrepresented in international environmental literature.