CEU Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2023
| Author | Helwig, Jonah |
|---|---|
| Title | The Impact of the Commonwealth of Independent States on Legal Harmonization in the Post-Soviet Space |
| Summary | Policy transfer and diffusion has been the topic of extensive research. Recently there has been increased interest in the diffusion of policies between authoritarian governments. Research has found that international and regional organizations can serve as a platform for policy learning and diffusion. Some scholars have suggested that organizations founded and dominated by authoritarian governments can act as a mechanism for the diffusion of illiberal policies such as the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS) or the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO). Lemon and Antonov (2020) found that the CIS helped to transfer policies restricting political participation, civil society, and peaceful assembly among its members. This paper further investigates the influence of the CIS on legal harmonization in the post-Soviet space. In an attempt to harmonize environmental practices in the post-Soviet space the CIS developed a model forest code. This paper tests if the harmonization effort was successful by investigating if the CIS had influence over the development of the Russian and Armenian forest codes. Through textual and discourse analysis the author finds that the similarities between the CIS model forest code and the Armenia forest codes are coincidental and rather the result of diffusion from other organizations such as the Food and Agriculture Organization. The Russian code has several similarities to the CIS model code and other organizations such as the European and North Asian Forest Law Enforcement and Governance conference were less influential in Russia during the development of the code which indicates that the CIS model code did diffuse at least in part to Russia. |
| Supervisor | Cartwright, Andrew |
| Department | Public Policy MA |
| Full text | https://www.etd.ceu.edu/2023/helwig_jonah.pdf |
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