Niches of agency: managing state-region relations through law in Russia

Abstract

State-region relations involve negotiations over the power to (re)constitute local spaces. While in federal states, power-sharing ostensibly gives regions a role over many space-making decisions, power asymmetries affect this role. Where centralization trends may erode regional agency, law can provide an important tool by which regions can assert influence. We examine a case where, in response to a proposed Russian federal law highly unpopular with a regional population, the region's government sought to ameliorate its potential impacts by using opportunities to coproduce the law, amending regional legislation, and strategically implementing other federal and regional laws to protect its territory.

The Evolution of Forming “Territories of Traditional Nature Use” in the Sakha Republic (Iakutiia)

“…In early 2015, the Russian parliament, with the enthusiastic backing of President Vladimir Putin, began developing a program known colloquially as the Far East Hectare (FEH). Envisioned as a way to attract population to the Far East Federal District, including SR, which has lost significant population in the post-Soviet period, the FEH program permits any Russian citizen to apply for a free hectare of land in the District (Fondahl et al 2019). The leadership of several federal subjects, including SR, was not pleased with this unilateral federal initiative.…”

“…This was facilitated by the TTPs' loss of OOPT status; TTP establishment procedures now fell under republican jurisdiction. In addition, given that many of the TTPs created earlier had not completed the expensive detailed cadastral work required to register (and achieve full legal status), to protect against the FEH the republic government supported this work for both new and extant TTPs, both logistically and financially (Fondahl et al 2019).…”

“…Reacting to federal actions that weakened protections on Indigenous northerners' land, SR's moves to provide greater protection to TTP lands in the face of industrial development (via the 2010 Ethnological Expertise law) and to facilitate and considerably increase the number of TTPs in the face of a federal land giveaway program (FEH), should be understood as a strategic retort to Moscow (Fondahl et al 2019). Both the mass creation of TTPs and the development of the Ethnological Expertise Law serve SR's objective to reclaim some degree of authority over the activities sanctioned for its territory.…”

Using Cultural Framings to Disentangle Viliui Sakha Perceptions, Beliefs, and Historical Trauma in the Face of Climate Change

“…Their main aim was to protect against the appropriation of land via two federal programs. First, was the domestic Far Eastern Hectare program, which offers one hectare of land in the Russian Far East to Russian citizens and of which many fear will result in encroachment onto Indigenous areas, and land grabbing by outsiders (Fondahl et al 2019).…”

Social Well-Being of the Evens in the Arctic Zone of the Republic of Sakha (Yakutia): A Sociological Aspect

“…Это коренным образом отличается от ситуации в некоторых других регионах ДФО. Например, в Хабаровском крае территория ТТП уменьшилась более чем на 50 %, с 30,7 млн до 14,9 млн га, а территориальная Ассоциация коренных малочисленных народов Севера предъявила иск за потерю земель из-за ассигнований на реализацию федерального закона о дальневосточном гектаре» [2].…”