Science, sulphur and sustainability : environmental strategies of mining in the Russian Kola Peninsula

Abstract

This dissertation analyses the problem of co-aligning corporate strategy and public policy for effective environmental governance. A case study of the mining industry in the Russian Kola Peninsula shows how institutional arrangements (including public policies) affect the environmental performance of industrial organizations. The analysis emphasizes the motivations that drive people's decisions and how they are affected by culture and formal institutions both inside and outside the domain of public policy. It bridges management and governance studies with an added focus on engineering approaches to sustainability. In substantial terms, the dissertation has a strong focus on "complex utilization", which has been a common environmental and natural resource strategy in Russia since the 1930s. In an important respect, complex utilization both antedates and closely resembles industrial ecology that has been developed in the West. This suggests that a lack of technical knowledge was not the principal cause of the well-known environmental problems that existed in the Soviet Union. On the contrary, the potential benefits of complex utilization were not realized because Soviet political and economic institutions provided weak incentives for pollution control and efficient resource use. The central theoretical effort of this dissertation is to show how effective environmental governance is contingent upon emergent strategy and policy processes. Both corporate environmental strategy and public environmental policy depend on power relations and network building among a variety of actors in the society. The case study yields three different emergent processes: political embedding of scientific concepts, cultural contextualization of indicators, and legitimacy in stakeholder salience. The dissertation also delivers policy recommendations pertaining to the future development of the Barents Euro-Arctic region. This future depends both on the level of political centralization and on the future development of the oil and gas industry in the region. On one hand, it is possible that the mining industry will continue on the same path as it has done throughout the 2000s. It will continue to develop its environmental strategy primarily on the basis of signals from the international market and a few dominant stakeholder groups. On the other hand, it is possible that complex utilization will be strengthened as an environmental strategy in the region. The two future scenarios allow for case specific recommendations for indicators and environmental co-operation.