Using Non-profit Organizations to Reduce Regional Variation in Environmental Quality

When environmental quality is poor and also varies widely between individual regions, new ways of
addressing environmental problems are needed with special emphasis on reducing differing impact
that these problems have on individual territories. Involving the third (non-profit non-governmental)
sector more directly may be a means to that end. This study outlines environmental projects that
have been initiated and implemented by non-profit organizations in the Russian Federation and assesses their success in reducing regional variation. Data was analyzed from 5,853 projects submitted from 2017 to 2023 in competitions for Presidential Grants related to the environment. Indicators
from the Federal State Statistics Service and Rosprirodnadzor were also employed. Content analysis
of project applications relied upon descriptive statistics methods and calculation of correlation coefficients. The environmental projects that were submitted as well as those that won exhibited a high
degree of differentiation by specific topics and regions. In addition, there has been debate over the
past two years among some grant applicants and fund experts about the importance of certain
environmental problems. Waste management projects developed by non-profit organizations often
do not take into account the relative urgency of solving such problems for a given location and
are largely guided by prior experience and expertise. The experts do consider the relative value of
projects (although not to its full extent) for a territory along with the experience of grant applicants
and the region itself. As a result, the projects implemented contribute very little to reducing the
differences in environmental quality among the country’s regions. There is also path dependence
that can have both positive and negative consequences. The article provides recommendations for
changing how the authorities and the officials at the Presidential Grants Fund work with non-profit
organizations.

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