Think global act local? Negotiating sustainable development under postcommunist transformation

Abstract

These essays are offered as a contribution to the ongoing scholarly discourse concerned with environmental problems in East Central Europe (ECE). In this volume we concentrate on the local through papers that indicate the nature of environmental challenges and ways in which progress is being made not merely by legislation but by negotiating sustainability in a range of local situations. Written by social scientists, largely geographers and anthropologists, from Western Europe as well as ECE and North America these essays provide ethnographically-detailed case studies of local environmental transformations in eight different countries. The emphasis on locality studies unites all the authors who, in different ways, develop the central idea that the macrosociological oversimplifications of the 1980s and 1990s can only be countered, and indeed corrected, through careful consideration of the diversity of local realities. All the case studies are concerned with the environmental dimensions of postcommunist transformations, whether that be through pollution abatement, restructuring over rights to natural resources such as forests or the implementation of ecotourism as a local redevelopment strategy. Sustainable development is therefore a leitmotif of this collection and most of the papers offer empirically-grounded critique of the concept insofar as it has permeated debates about local development in the postcommunist world.