Environmental Policy Reform in the Post-communist Czech Republic: The Case of Air Pollution
Bibliographic record
Abstract
THE DEVELOPMENT OF ENVIRONMENTAL POLICY in Western countries during the past three decades is a remarkable story of policy change driven by public concern. Environmental activists and Green parties have pushed environmental issues onto national government agendas in the face of stiff opposition from economic interests. In 1989 the world witnessed a new wave of environmental protest in East Central Europe (ECE). As environmental groups rallied public opposition to the region's failing communist regimes, many Western analysts predicted that grassroots activism would drive environmental policy reform in post-communist countries.2 This prediction turned out to be unfounded. Across the region, public concern about the environment plummeted after 1989 as the hardships of transition to a market economy took centre stage. Environmental policy came to be developed largely in isolation from societal pressures. In this article I examine the dynamics and results of environmental policy reform in the Czech Republic between 1989 and 1998. The first section analyses the changing nature of the driving forces behind environmental policy reform in the post-communist Czech Republic. In the late 1980s the Czech lands (then part of the former Czechoslovakia) had some of the most severe environmental problems in ECE, as well as one of the region's most significant grassroots environmental opposition movements. The prominence of environmental themes during the 'Velvet Revolution' of November 1989 resulted in the creation of a powerful Czech Environment Ministry headed by former 'green dissidents'. Yet the ministry's efforts to forge a more inclusive environmental policy process were soon undermined by a rapid and sustained decline in popular concern with the environment, attributable chiefly to the function of environmental protest in 1989 as an outlet for broader
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.004 | 0.007 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.014 | 0.012 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.015 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.008 |
| Research integrity | 0.005 | 0.005 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".