Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
to bear on both the state and the investor can help to establish more
legitimate decision-making procedures. The national movement can
develop such strategies across individual cases and must do this when
the cases are linked, because investors could have strong legal and politi-
cal grounds to use one case as precedent for another and convincing
economic rationales for continuing with linked projects once one of the
projects has been started.
Ultimately, each case is shaped to a great deal by its contingencies in
strategies, timing, and framing. In order for patterns of contingencies
and their outcomes to become regularized and predictable enough to
facilitate strategizing, political decision-making processes and the appli-
cation and enforcement of standards, laws, and regulations must be
institutionalized. In the Krumovgrad and Chelopech cases, the ad hoc
decisions by the Minister of Environment, although providing immediate
relief to opponents, did nothing to strengthen institutional processes and
standards for decision making. Institutionalization is necessary not only
for consistency across locales, but also for consistency across time. Deci-
sions made to stop or alter a particular investment do not necessarily set
the lines of participation and environmental justice in the country or
even in that locale. The potential for recurrence once a particular invest-
ment is stopped or adjusted is real, as we have seen with Chelopech.
Firms can hold permits, land, or shares, and bide their time; or they can
sell them to other fi rms who then initiate new investment processes.
Whether citizens can obtain environmental justice will depend largely on
whether earlier rounds strengthened the institutions that ensure rights or
whether the coalition that stopped or changed an investment project
remains intact and develops effective strategies for subsequent rounds
(and cases). Decision making in these cases under the new government
suggests some regularization of institutional procedure and continued
challenges by the opposing coalition, but it is too early to tell whether
these processes have actually strengthened citizens' recourse to law to
protect their rights.
In Bulgaria, there is a long way to go in strengthening the institutions
that can ensure a rule of law, including the integrity of investment, EIA,
and participation procedures—all of which are necessary to guarantee
environmental justice. Given the political trajectory in the early transi-
tion period, the resulting balance of two main opposing camps, the ties
between each of these camps and circles of businesses and banks that
benefi t from their rule and support them (a pattern replicated by other
parties as they entered the political scene), and very limited progress
