Pål Wilter Skedsmo - Armenia and Europe: Foreign Aid and Environmental Politics in the Post-Soviet Caucasus

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Armenia and Europe

Armenia and Europe

Foreign Aid and Environmental Politics in the Post-Soviet Caucasus

Pl Wilter Skedsmo

Contents

The primary focus of this book is environmentalism and foreign aid in Armenia, areas in which Armenias obligations under multilateral environmental conventions, its soviet heritage and status as a foreign aid recipient play important roles. The book is a revised and abridged version of my PhD thesis in social anthropology at the University of Oslo.

The people I encountered and befriended in Armenia became a big part of my life after setting foot in Hayastan the land of Hayk for the first time in 2006. I would like to extend my warmest appreciation to the Jenderedjian family who gave me a home from home every time I was in Yerevan. Special thanks for the way you welcomed my family when they joined me on fieldwork in Yerevan. I also want to express my gratitude to other friends, project partners and informants in Armenia for their hospitality, generosity and patience.

In a way, this book is as much about Norway as it is about Armenia, and there are many people I would like to thank here as well. I am especially indebted to and extremely grateful for the support and advice of my supervisor Knut Gunnar Nustad. Your keen eye for the finest details as well as your ability to convey different ways of framing the material have been a great inspiration and help. Many thanks!

Some of my present and prior colleagues at the Fridtjof Nansen Institute deserve special mention: Steinar Andresen, Jrgen Holten Jrgensen and Peter Johan Schei for our memorable first excursions to Armenia; Director Geir Hnneland for his encouragement and trust; Lars Rowe for reading and commenting on the entire manuscript; and finally Ida Folkestad Soltvedt for superb technical help in formatting the manuscript for publication.

Many thanks to my editor Tomasz Hoskins at I.B. Tauris for encouraging the publication of this book and for his professional support. I have been very fortunate in being able to rely on the professional and also creative language assistance provided by Chris Saunders.

Tove and Einar (who joined me on fieldwork in Armenia) and Anna (well go to Armenia together one day!): thanks for all your support, care and for keeping me grounded. My gratitude for the trust, love and patience of these three people I hold dearest in the world can never be adequately expressed.

While there are many who have earned my gratitude, only one person is to blame for any flaws and mistakes: they, of course, are my responsibility alone.

Polhgda, February 2018

Aarhus Convention	UNECE Convention on Access to Information, Public Participation in Decision-Making and Access to Justice in Environmental Matters
ACP	Armenia Copper Programme
ASSR	Armenian Socialist Soviet Republic
AUA	American University of Armenia
EaP	Eastern Partnership
EIA	Environmental impact assessment
ELRC	Environmental Law Resource Centre
ENVSEC	Environment and Security Initiative
FNI	Fridtjof Nansen Institute
IDPs	Internally displaced persons
IMF	International Monetary Fund
MEA	Multilateral environmental agreement
MFA	Ministry of Foreign Affairs
MNP	Ministry of Nature Protection of the Republic of Armenia
MoP	Meeting of Parties (to the Aarhus Convention)
NGO	Non-governmental organization
NORAD	Norwegian Agency for Development Cooperation
ODA	Official development assistance
OSCE	Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe
PEIC	Public Environmental Information Centre
RA	Republic of Armenia
RAMSAR	Ramsar Convention on Wetlands
SAP	Structural adjustment programmes
STCI	Save Teghut Civic Initiative
UNDP	United Nations Development Programme
UNEP	United Nations Environment Programme
UNCCD	United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification
UNECE	United Nations Economic Commission for Europe
USSR	United Socialist Soviet Republics
YSU	Yerevan State University

Armenia and several other post-Soviet directed at the post-Soviet Caucasus.

Although my principal locus is Armenia, the object of study lies at the point of convergence between sites in the world of international development projects and where their different offshoots have led (me), be it in Armenia, Moldova or Norway. I will argue that this international aid field exists not only in professional and social encounters but also in documents sent back and forth between activists, development consultants, government officials and transnational organizations. The common denominator, however, is that Armenia is the main locus and target of change in this ethnography, either from within or as a result of outsiders influence and policies.

My argument is that the locals, who ostensibly are at the receiving end in Armenia, take an active part in forming, interpreting and making use of new entitlements by establishing networks and challenging authorities by connecting themselves to wider narratives and imaginaries of the global, the environment, development and Europe. I tie these elements together by applying the concept of assemblages insofar as it facilitates an analysis of how connections are made, claimed and conjured across time and place.

With regard to Armenia, my research touches on several fields, sites and global connections.

I use my experience as a project manager of one of the development projects in Armenia to analyse some central features within a scheme to bring Armenia closer to Europe. Through the management of this project, I gradually became intrigued by how what I had done as project manager and the policies informing my work were legitimized in the donor office in Norway. Likewise, processes related to the Aarhus Convention somehow rested on a set of shared premises relating to development and the environment as an object of political action, thereby Europeanizing Armenia from the inside as well as from the outside.

Much of what has been written on what is sometimes called western. But what if they are not interested in being compelled? What if they want to attach themselves to an imaginary and outdated image of us?

I was in Armenia as an agent of development change, something I found slightly problematic at the time and which this book is an attempt to resolve. I see my own participation as alternating between phases of hope, practical administration and critical understanding. to a particular idea of Europe.

Let me briefly point to two different ways of framing and contextualizing

Politics of the environment and development as anthropological problems

This book addresses issues of post-socialism, development and globality in a way I shall frame as an anthropological problem. The ethnography of Armenias implementation of the Aarhus Convention, the foreign aid project and the role of local and international NGO networks are characterized in many ways by geographic and temporal dispersion. In this ethnography, projects, concepts, documents and networks have inherent flow capacities, yet they operate within a trajectory of post-Soviet transition and development in Armenia, characterized by continuity and change. So, while acknowledging the abrupt change wrought by the dissolution of the Soviet Union, with the various democracy projects and concepts following in its wake, historical continuities and trajectories play an important role in understanding how such projects evolved on the ground, how they were negotiated and resisted. These processes, I suggest, take place within networks.

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