In this interview Laura A. Henry and Lisa McIntosh Sundstrom discuss the research and findings of their recent article in Environmental Politics: Russia’s climate policy in an era of pandemic and war: weathering disruption.
Congratulations on your recent article! What is the overall message that you hope people take from this publication?
Thank you! We are interested in whether critical junctures – moments of political and economic upheaval – might change climate policy. Hypothetically, upheaval could provide the opportunity and motivation for more ambitious efforts to address climate change. The global COVID-19 pandemic and Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine were shocks to the status quo in Russia (one unexpected and one self-inflicted) that had the potential to unsettle everything from international energy markets and domestic energy production to perceptions of the need for global cooperation.
We show that these shocks worsened the context for climate policy in Russia, yet – somewhat unexpectedly – the incremental process of developing climate policy continues in the Russian bureaucracy. Counterintuitively, it may be the low salience of climate policy for the regime that allows it to continue to develop, even at a very modest level.
Your article focuses on how Russia’s climate policy has been affected by the crises of the COVID-19 pandemic and the ongoing war on Ukraine. What did you find?
We found that the pandemic caused a temporary drop in energy use and prices, potentially strengthening arguments for energy saving and diversification away from extractive industries. However, this disruption was relatively short and did not shift Russia’s interest in continuing its reliance on fossil fuels exports for a significant share if the country’s revenue. In 2021, prior to the full-scale invasion of Ukraine, Russia remained the world’s second largest exporter of crude oil and largest exporter of natural gas. Pandemic isolation also narrowed the number of actors who had access to key decision-makers, marginalizing technocrats who might see benefits to some aspects of climate policy.
Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine has even more negative effects on climate policy. Despite sanctions blocking or limiting oil and gas purchases by Western states and companies, the Russian government now relies even more on oil and gas exports for its revenues, because other types of trade and investment are even more heavily sanctioned, and oil prices on world markets have surged for much of the wartime period.
Russia has also found ways to circumvent European sanctions by exporting to other countries like China, India and Turkey. Moreover, the EU is still somewhat reliant on Russian fossil fuels, with Russian LNG imports even increasing since the full-scale invasion.
Politically, the war also amplified domestic elite discourse depicting Russia as besieged by the West, and reduced the government’s willingness to engage in global cooperation. In fact, some Russian actors argue that international climate agreements are designed by Western countries as a means to weaken Russia. Voices advocating climate policy have been further restricted. In 2023, the Ministry of Justice labeled WWF a foreign agent and Greenpeace was classified as an undesirable organization; both organizations have since closed in Russia.
Russia’s authoritarianism is also a factor in your article, but there’s a contrast here with China. Why is that?
In Russia, increasingly authoritarian politics over the pandemic and wartime periods, combined with a fossil fuel-reliant economy, have led to persistently weak climate policy. By contrast, while China also has an authoritarian regime, it is an energy importer rather than exporter. China has an interest not only in saving money through energy efficiency, and reducing costly imports, but also in dominating new global markets for renewable energy, electric cars, and other climate-friendly products. As a result, China has implemented unexpectedly ambitious climate policies at times, given its lower GDP per capita and similarly closed political system as compared to Russia.
It’s also not the case that all fossil fuel-dependent economies fail to take climate action. We make the point that democratic regimes that are petrostates, such as Norway, are able to adopt strong climate policies when they face popular pressure to do so through competitive elections. So it’s really the combination of authoritarian political institutions and an economy based on fossil fuel extraction that seem to make authoritarian regimes incapable of developing strong climate change mitigation policies.
Having identified instances where Russia’s policies didn’t change direction, can you think of what might need to happen for things to change?
We suggest that Russia is likely to pursue a more ambitious climate policy if these policies are seen as win-win – improving the Russian government’s stature among domestic or international audiences, solving real problems in the country, and generating economic benefits. This kind of policy shift is most likely under a different political regime. International factors, such as the European Union’s Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism, may contribute to shift economic calculations in the future. More pressing, Russia is feeling the effects of climate change in many regions, particularly the Arctic. While the government occasionally celebrates the “advantages of climate change” in opening up new sea routes, adaption to melting permafrost, forest fires, flooding and other disasters is expensive and a source of discontent among citizens. These effects may start to shift domestic discourses and force the government to do more.
Finally, what’s next? Are you publishing more on this topic?
One of the factors that we did not have much space to discuss in the current article is the repression faced by Russian civil society activists, especially during the war, and how this has severely weakened previous forms of policy collaboration as well as pressure on the government to improve its climate action. We are currently interviewing climate and environmental activists who left Russia due to the war in Ukraine to better understand how they try to advocate for action from outside Russia. For example, some Russian activists now living abroad work internationally to tighten sanctions on Russia’s fossil fuel industry, while others engage in digital activism, including environmental journalism and information campaigns around COP meetings
Bios:
Laura A. Henry is a Professor in the Department of Government and Legal Studies at Bowdoin College in Brunswick, Maine. She has a Ph.D. in Political Science from the University of California, Berkeley. Henry is the co-author (with Lisa McIntosh Sundstrom) of Bringing Global Governance Home: NGO Mediation in BRICS States (Oxford University Press, 2021) and the author of Red to Green: Environmental Activism in Post-Soviet Russia (Cornell University Press, 2010). She is also the co-editor of Russian Civil Society: A Critical Assessment (M.E. Sharpe, 2006). She has been a Watson Fellow and a Fulbright Scholar, and a visiting scholar at the Aleksanteri Institute at the University of Helsinki, the Institute of Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies at the University of California, Berkeley, and the Center for Independent Social Research in St. Petersburg, Russia.
Lisa McIntosh Sundstrom is Professor of Political Science at the University of British Columbia. She has a PhD from Stanford University. Her recent books include Bringing Global Governance Home: How BRICS NGOs Engage the World (2021, co-authored with Laura A. Henry) and Courting Gender Justice: Russia, Turkey, and the European Court of Human Rights (2019, co-authored with Valerie Sperling and Melike Sayoglu), both from Oxford University Press. She has published in scholarly journals including International Organization, Global Environmental Politics, Communist and Post-Communist Studies, Europe-Asia Studies, Human Rights Quarterly, International Journal of Human Rights, Problems of Post-Communism, Post-Soviet Affairs, and Human Rights Quarterly.
