Driving Forces for Environmental Policy-Making and Capacity Building in the Baltic Sea Region

It is often said that the Baltic Sea is the most polluted, yet the most protected sea in the
world. However, the long history of pollution and protection of the Baltic Sea remains completely unstudied. The environmental history of pollution and the protection of the seas and oceans is in general an unexplored theme, despite the fact that they cover two-thirds of the surface of the globe.

The proposed project will explore the long-term development of national governance of water pollution and protection in the catchment and coastal area of the Baltic Sea from the late 19th to the 21st century. The study will focus on the three largest states in the Baltic Sea region (Sweden, Finland and Russia) but other countries will be taken into account as well. When, how and why did these states start to develop and adopt nation-wide strategies, policies and institutional tools to control inland and coastal water pollution? What were the driving forces and obstacles for water protection in capitalist and socialist states?

Environmental policy-making (choices), related capacity building (structures) and driving forces (context) of national water pollution and protection will be examined in the international context of ecology of war, that is, cycles of war and peace. We will explore to what extent cycles of water protection in the Baltic Sea Region over the past century were caused by major continental political crises, that is WW I and II, Soviet expansion, the Cold War, and the consequent collapse of the USSR followed by the expansion of NATO and the EU.

The project is supported by Östersjöstiftelse, run at the Department of Contemporary History at the Södertörn University, Sweden, and directed by Dr. Simo Laakkonen. At Södertörn University Dr. Åsa Casula Vifell explores the development of marine monitoring by state agencies.