Politics and the Environment in Eastern Europe

Eszter Krasznai Kovacs

Description

Europe remains divided between east and west, with differences caused and worsened by uneven economic and political development. Amid these divisions, the environment has become a key battleground. The condition and sustainability of environmental resources are interlinked with systems of governance and power, from local to EU levels. Key challenges in the eastern European region today include increasingly authoritarian forms of government that threaten the operations and very existence of civil society groups; the importation of locally-contested conservation and environmental programmes that were designed elsewhere; and a resurgence in cultural nationalism that prescribes and normalises exclusionary nation-building myths.


This volume draws together essays by early-career academic researchers from across eastern Europe. Engaging with the critical tools of political ecology, its contributors provide a hitherto overlooked perspective on the current fate and reception of ‘environmentalism’ in the region. It asks how emergent forms of environmentalism have been received, how these movements and perspectives have redefined landscapes, and what the subtler effects of new regulatory regimes on communities and environment-dependent livelihoods have been.


Arranged in three sections, with case studies from Czechia, Hungary, Lithuania, Poland, Romania and Serbia, this collection develops anthropological views on the processes and consequences of the politicisation of the environment. It is valuable reading for human geographers, social and cultural historians, political ecologists, social movement and government scholars, political scientists, and specialists on Europe and European Union politics.

 

Sujets

• Environmentalism
• Political ecology
• Eastern Europe
• Environment
• Western Europe
• Economics

Informations

• Publié par: Open Book Publishers
• Date de parution: 28 juillet 2021
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781800641358
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 2 Mo

Extrait

POLITICS AND THE ENVIRONMENT IN EASTERN EUROPE

Politics and the Environment in Eastern Europe
Edited by Eszter Krasznai Kovács





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© 2021 Eszter Krasznai Kovács. Copyright of individual chapters is maintained by the chapters’ authors.




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Eszter Krasznai Kovács (ed.), Politics and the Environment in Eastern Europe . Cambridge, UK: Open Book Publishers, 2021, https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0244
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ISBN Paperback: 9781800641327
ISBN Hardback: 9781800641334
ISBN Digital (PDF): 9781800641341
ISBN Digital ebook (epub): 9781800641358
ISBN Digital ebook (mobi): 9781800641365
ISBN XML: 9781800641372
DOI: 10.11647/OBP.0244
Cover image: ‘People before coal’ action (Warsaw, 18 November 2013). People from around the world gathered in front of Poland’s Ministry of Economy in protest of the World Coal Association’s International Coal and Climate Summit organised on the sidelines of the 19th UN climate change conference. Flickr, https://bit.ly/3wumjlP
Cover design by Anna Gatti

Contents
Acknowledgements
vii
Contributors
ix
Introduction: Political Ecology in Eastern Europe
1
Eszter Krasznai Kovács
Part I
1.
The Dismantling of Environmentalism in Hungary
25
Eszter Krasznai Kovács and György Pataki
2.
The Making of the Environmental and Climate Justice Movements in the Czech Republic
53
Arnošt Novák
3.
The Construction of Climate Justice Imaginaries through Resistance in the Czech Republic and Poland
73
Mikulás Č ernìk
4.
Gaps of Warsaw: Urban Environmentalism through Green Interstices
97
Jana Hrckova
Part II
5.
Far-right Grassroots Environmental Activism in Poland and the Blurry Lines of ‘Acceptable’ Environmentalisms
121
Balsa Lubarda
6.
Contorted Naturalisms: The Concept of Romanian Nationalist Mountains
141
Alexandra Co ț ofan ă
7.
A (Hi)Story of Dwelling in a (Post)Mining Town in Romania
163
Imola Püsök
Part III
8.
The Shifting Geopolitical Ecologies of Wild Nature Conservation in Romania
185
George Iord ă chescu
9.
Domesticating the Taste of Place: Post-Socialist Terroir and Policy Landscapes in Tokaj, Hungary
211
June Brawner
10.
A Geographical Political Ecology of Eastern European Food Systems
235
Renata Blumberg
11.
What Is Not Known about Rural Development? Village Experiences from Serbia
261
Jovana Dikovic
12.
Failure to Hive: A Co-narrated Story of a Failed Social Co-operative from the Hungarian Countryside
283
Éva Mihalovics and Zsüli Fehér
Concluding Thoughts
307
The Contributors
List of Figures
315
Index
319

Acknowledgements
This book became possible because of the generous support of the Leverhulme Trust through an Early Career Research Fellowship, which during my time at the Department of Geography at the University of Cambridge was also financed by the Newton Trust. The time and independence of thought won for research through such grants is incalculable. Workshops and conferences were also enabled through a British Academy Small Grant.
I would like to thank Eszter Kelemen, György Pataki, Jessica Hope, Tatiana Thieme and Bill Adams for their comments and conversations on earlier drafts and iterations of some of the arguments presented here.
I will also never forget how the final versions of these chapters took shape, as bubbles of time unpredictably won during little Sophie’s naps. I am very thankful for the understanding, patience and kindness shown by all the contributors and supporters to this volume during this time.

Contributors
Renata Blumberg is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Nutrition and Food Studies at Montclair State University, in Montclair, NJ. She has a BA in Anthropology from Columbia College, Columbia University, an MS in International Agricultural Development from the University of California, Davis and a Ph.D. in Geography from the University of Minnesota. Most of her research has been on alternative food networks in eastern Europe, but she has recently started a project in the USA on efforts to improve access to farmers’ markets. Her other research interests include feminist pedagogy and critical dietetics.
June Brawner is a Policy Adviser at the Royal Society of London, UK. She received her Ph.D. in Anthropology at the University of Georgia in 2019. She has conducted research in Hungary since 2010, receiving a Mellon-Council for European Studies Dissertation Completion Fellowship (2018–2019) and Fulbright Study Award (2016–2017). She earned an MS in Crop and Soil Sciences from UGA (2018) and an MA in Sociology and Social Anthropology at the Central European University in Budapest, Hungary (2011). She has worked and published on many interdisciplinary projects related to food justice, human rights, rural development and musicology.
Mikuláš Černík is a Ph.D. candidate at the Department of Environmental Studies of Masaryk University in Brno, Czech Republic. His research focuses on resistance to coal mining in the Czech Republic and Poland. He is also involved in the climate justice movement Limity jsme my , and is a member of Re-set, a platform for socio-ecological transformation.



Alexandra Coțofană ’s research explores intersections of politics, modernities and ontologies of governing. Alexandra’s scholarly interests focus on political ecologies, the ontological turn, the study of political elites and ways of governing, as well as the occult as a tool for governing, and discursive techniques employed in populist imaginaries to form racial, gender, and political Others.
Jovana Dikovic is a social anthropologist currently running her postdoctoral research project at the Department of Social Anthropology and Cultural Studies of the University of Zurich, where she also teaches. In her career, she has focused on and studied the rural Balkans. Her research and publications are mainly concerned with understanding change in rural areas, the ethics of production and soil, institution building and cooperation. In her ongoing project ‘Farming under barricades: Study of cooperation in post-conflict Kosovo’, she analyses farming in the context of post-war institutional anguish and stabilisation of inter-ethnic relationships.
Jana Hrckova is a Ph.D. Candidate at the Department of Sociology and Social Anthropology at the Central European University in Budapest. Her current research focuses on air pollution and green infrastructures in Warsaw.
George Iordăchescu currently researches illegal logging and the timber trade as part of the BIOSEC Project at the Department of Politics at the University of Sheffield, UK. He approaches forest crime from a political ecology perspective while tracing the socio-economic entanglements of deforestation and related illicit businesses in Romania and the EU. Over the last few years, George has undertaken fieldwork in the Romanian Carpathians and Poland, focused on private conservation projects, customary land governance and forest livelihoods. His Ph.D. thesis, completed at the IMT School for Advanced Studies in Lucca, investigated the production and protection of wilderness in eastern Europe. In the coming years, George will start a new research project investigating the illegal wildlife trade in European species, in which he will combine approaches from political ecology and green criminology.
Eszter Krasznai Kovács is a Lecturer in Environment, Society and Politics at University College London. Her research looks at how conservation and environmental management are thought about and realised between ‘centres’ and ‘peripheries’, such as between the urban and rural, the European west and east, the Global North and South. She