Citizen (dis)engagement during assessment of sports mega-events: the case of the 2013 Universiade in Kazan, Russia
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Citizen (dis)engagement during assessment of sports mega-events: the case of the 2013 Universiade in Kazan, Russia
Department of Sociology, Kazan (Volga Region) Federal University, Kazan, Russia
Center of Advanced Economic Research Academy of Sciences of the Republic of Tatarstan, Ostrovskogo 23-1, 420111Kazan, Russia Published online: 23 Jan 2014.
To cite this article: Polina Ermolaeva , Impact Assessment and Project Appraisal (2014): Citizen (dis)engagement during assessment of sports mega-events: the case of the 2013 Universiade in Kazan, Russia, Impact Assessment and Project Appraisal, DOI: 10.1080/14615517.2014.871810
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Citizen (dis)engagement during assessment of sports mega-events: the case of the 2013 Universiade in Kazan, Russia
Department of Sociology, Kazan (Volga Region) Federal University, Kazan, Russia;
Center of Advanced Economic Research Academy of Sciences of the Republic of Tatarstan, Ostrovskogo 23-1, 420111 Kazan, Russia
(Received 9 July 2013; accepted 2 December 2013)
Based on the environmental case of the 2013 Universiade in Kazan, this research highlights that despite the variety of tools employed for citizen engagement, the key procedures can be claimed as ‘false dialogues’. The study identifies the key factors for such a discrepancy. The main external barriers for post-socialist Russian cities include the limited time frame for building sports venues, poor execution of environmental legislation, and complicated bureaucratic procedures maintained by governmental actors. The internal factors are polarized positions in the community due to the complexity of the project, the gap between the citizen environmental concern and actual engagement in environmentally friendly behaviours associated with the lack of the environmental knowledge, time, and financial resources, lack of knowledge of the environmental impact assessment process, and dominance of the material and paternalistic values and low trust in government proponents.
Keywords: sports mega-events; citizen engagement; Russia; environmental decision-making; Universiade
A number of major international sporting events are to be hosted in post-socialist Russia over the coming decade – the 2013 Universiade (Kazan, Russia), the 2014 Winter Olympics (Sochi, Russia), and the 2018 FIFA World Cup (across some cities in Russia). The levels of federal funding allocated for preparation for these events are exceptional, suggesting they are likely to serve as catalysts for rapid urban regeneration, infrastructural and institutional innovation, and vibrant material and discursive change in social relations.
In addressing these transformations successfully, the interaction among different stakeholders has to be managed. Citizen engagement is crucial at all stages of the sports mega-event to secure transparency of governmental decision-making, avoid citizen alienation, and increase citizens’ sense of self-worth. From the economic point of view, as sports mega-projects draw on public funds, local citizens/taxpayers also have rights to participate in decision-making processes (e.g. Leonardsen 2007).
However, these virtues of citizen engagement, while good in theory and policy books, are not tangible and are not easy to achieve in practice due to many internal and external barriers. These include, but are not limited to, institutional norms and governmental regulations, the pressure of limited timing for the construction of sports facilities, people’s attitudes and knowledge, as well as their behaviour and routine practices.
A review of the relevant literature demonstrates that citizen engagement in urban development in connection to sports mega-events has been a research topic for multidisciplinary researchers. Previous research has examined the importance of citizen engagement in preparing for mega-events (Flyvbjerg et al. 2003), the inclusion of vulnerable groups in planning processes (Fontan et al. 2004), and many others. Similarly, different dimensions of citizen engagement on environmental issues have been broadly analysed in the literature such as innovative forms of public participation in the environmental decision-making (Konisky & Beierle 2001), social and economic impact assessment and community participation (Lockie 2001, 2008), and so on. Comparatively little research has been undertaken, however, that draws these themes together by investigating citizen engagement on environmental issues specifically in the context of preparation for sports mega-events. What research is available, further, focuses primarily on mega-events in western Europe and North America, largely ignoring the recent trend for these events to be hosted in developing countries such as Brazil and Russia (Mu? ller 2012). Modest research has been undertaken on sports mega-events in post-socialist Russia (Mu?ller 2012; Trubina 2012), the bulk of which has been published only in the Russian language (Trubina 2012; Karbainov 2013). The intent of this article is to provide insights into the current configuration and problems of facilitating citizen (dis)engagement on environmental initiatives in postsocialist Russia based on the city of Kazan, host of the 2013 Summer Universiade. The research objectives are: first, to encourage reflection on current efforts to make use of understandings of citizen engagement and second, to identify the factors that need to overcome to engage broader stakeholders groups in local environmental initiatives. With these in mind, this contribution seeks to work towards a better understanding not only of what the problems are in engaging citizens but also of the question of why these problems exists in connection to the current context of post-socialist Russia.
A variety of approaches to ‘citizen engagement’ indicated the complexity and ambiguity of the concept and also an extremely wide sphere of the application of the given phenomenon. For example, Diller (2001, p. 73) understands it as ‘any activity where people come together to fulfill their role as citizens’ while Zlatareva (2008) highlighted three features of citizen engagement as being participation, partnership, and empowerment.
Despite its many potential connotations, here the term is used vis-a`-vis methodological approach suggested in the documents of the United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs (2013). According to it, citizen engagement is grounded on the principle that ‘people should have – and want to have – a say in the decisions that affect their lives and to be able to increase their wellbeing through their own actions’ (Sheedy 2008, p. 7). Citizen engagement in Russia is recognized (Federal law 2004) as part of the state’s environmental impact assessment (EIA) process under Environmental Protection Act State Environmental Expert Committee. Citizen engagement must be organized before launching the construction projects in forms of public hearings, consultations, citizen advisory councils, public comment periods, community boards, citizens’ juries and other forms of engagement.
Sheedy (2008) suggests that unlike citizen participation, engagement is an intentional formal partnership between citizens and decision-makers which is initiated by government proponents, in contrast to actions taken by the initiatives of citizens alone. In some other literature, however, the meaning of the citizen engagement in environmental decision-making is synonymous to the concept of citizen participation; for example Creighton (2005) describes it as the interactive and organized process by which citizen’s concerns, needs, and values are incorporated into governmental and corporate decision-making.
Not all citizen engagement can be genuine in its intent to involve broad stakeholders in the environmental decision-making, rather ‘false’ dialogues often ensue. Unlike ‘genuine dialogue’, ‘false dialogues’ may be processes that bring citizens together to give a misleading impression that authorities are consulting on policy choices, but really they have already reached their decision. Sometimes citizen engagement can be performed well in the initial stages where the ‘players’ are provided with an impression that authorities are consulting on policies with broad stakeholders, while ultimately the real decision-making process has either happened or only involves limited groups. The latter groups act as gatekeepers and do not let the broad stakeholders enter the backstage, because if the front stage and the backstage intersect, it leads to a ‘spoiled performance’ (Goffmann 1967). Examples of ‘false dialogues’ provided by Sheedy (2008) include: the strategies of involving only the leaders of stakeholder groups, linking participation to policy where no decision-making power is allowed, engaging participants only in the last phase of policy development, looking for approval for already decided choice of alternatives, and aiming for the fulfillment of public consultation obligations without much interest in enacting opinion diversity. The given examples show that false dialogues prevent citizens from substantive engagement in the decision-making process.
Factors in citizen (dis)engagement on environmental issues
Literature research indicates that in most of current sports mega-events across the globe engaging citizens effectively face obstacles (Gaffney 2010). Conceptually, these obstacles can be recognized as external and internal factors.
External structures involve institutional norms and governmental regulations, economic and political conditions. These external structures are shaping citizen engagement in a macro level; while these structures may be beyond the control of citizens, they can affect people’s behaviour when broad social contexts are changed (for example, the government may start to accept only petitions with more than 100,000 signatures. These high expectations may force citizens to become disillusioned and/or force groups to spend time and resources on building coalitions to expand membership and to compete with referent groups. This rule change alters the behaviour of citizens and groups alike though it is entirely external from issues in which these individuals are engaged).
Mega-event planning is, according to Hiller (2000, p. 193), ‘top-down planning’, conceived by elites, running to fixed completion dates, in which the ‘idea of citizen participation is primarily merely responding to a plan conceived by others’, demoted to the role of after-the-fact consultation. The researchers agreed that if the governmental officials do not guide community engagement appropriately, unachieved expectations of citizens can lead to disillusionment among the community and apathy (Reid 2006).
Internal factors in citizen (dis)engagement involve characteristics of the personal domain – people’s education, skills, social class, length of residency in the community, attitudes and knowledge, behaviour practices and associated time, resources, and habit for action. These characteristics affect the quality and number of interactions citizens and groups have within their networks. Therefore, even if environmental policies were determined solely by environmentally concerned citizens, the deliberation among groups and individuals would still be affected by these internal factors, i.e. not all groups’ interactions have equal effect on policy outcomes. Some researchers (e.g. Putnam 2000) have stressed that citizens are becoming fatigued and detached from community engagement practices. Similarly, Creighton (2005) believes that there are always people in a community who do not care about social projects, while there are others who do not have the time to participate or knowledge of the EIA process (Wiklund 2011). In contrast Bauman (2001), conversely, has argued that people are searching for a sense of belonging and are thus willing to be engaged more because they are becoming more psychically isolated and losing their sense of place and identity.
The lack of financial resources to lobby citizens’ ideas along with domination of materialist values and key focus on fulfilling basic needs is of great relevance for community projects in developing societies such as postsocialist Russia. This restriction leads to another problem that arises in community development work, which is a lack of participation among lower socio-economic groups.
Another barrier to community engagement in developing countries could be the low level of trust people have in government proponents and their scepticism towards governments’ true intent in hearing the people’s voice on current national issues (Ngouana Kengne et al. 2013). Palerm (2000) suggests that in eastern European countries, the citizens do not much engage in the project even if given an opportunity which could be the result of the absence of participation traditions and low public trust in their input towards the legitimate decision-making process.
This research in a form of case study used a mixed methods approach. The qualitative elements involved semi-structured interviews with key city stakeholders on environmental issues, mass media discourse analysis, and desk research.
Desk research and mass media discourse analysis were used to identify the media agenda on the issues of citizen engagement in the pre-Universiade stage and the initial group of stakeholders for the interviews, while other stakeholders were identified through ‘snowball sampling’. Furthermore, discourse analysis was employed to identify local factors that affect the process of citizen engagement on environmental issues in the city of Kazan.
Mass Media discourse analysis employed seven Russian e-journals: two local (the Evening Kazan and the Business-online), three regional (the Republic of Tatastan, the Komsomolskaya Pravda of the Republic of Tatarstan, and the Zvezda Povolzya) and two national (the Russian newspaper and the Komsomolskaya Pravda of the Russian Federation) and one website ‘Public Control’ with a total amount of 58 articles with an environmental content. The items from e-journals were studied from April 2008 to April 2013. The given newspapers were chosen because they have different ideological positions, circulation, and target audiences. Articles were selected by keywords of Universiade, environment, environmental conflicts, citizen engagement and participation, public hearings, and Kazanka River.
Purposive sampling was used to select a sample of 15 experts from the different stakeholder groups: academia, environmental grassroots and NGOs, and governmental officials. The key informant interview questions generally sought insights into environmental citizen engagement processes and associated problems, along with analyses of public hearings on the case of the backfill of Kazanka River.
Citizen engagement: Kazanka River case
Kazan was announced as the host city for the 2013 Summer Universiade in Brussels on 31 May 2008. The 27th World University Summer Games in Kazan is to be the first Universiade in post-socialist Russia and takes place between 6 July and 17 July 2013 in the capital of the Republic of Tatarstan, the city of Kazan. Since 2008, Kazan has been in an intense process of preparation for the mega-event with (re)development of urban infrastructure including the building of 30 new sports and cultural facilities, airport renewal, construction of new roads and hotels, a subway, and train stations.
Three controversial cases were presented in the mass media and public agenda involving backfilling of the right bank of the Kazanka River as a result of the football stadium construction, demolishing real estate associated with building the ice hockey stadium in the area, and the backfilling of Kaban Lake including the real estate problems linked to the construction of the rowing canal.
While the aforementioned cases could be independent research projects, the discussion will concentrate on one of the most debated environmental cases in the mass media and among the citizens, which being the backfilling of the right bank of Kazanka River due to construction of the football stadium. The rationale behind it was the initiated governmental transformations in the General Urban Plan of Kazan, a basis of city planning and development, to modify the status of the recreational landscape zone and the natural sanctuary located in the right bank of the Kazanka River to the zone of the football and water sports stadium for the 2013 Universiade.
Public hearings on the planned changes were run on 19 October 2009 with a total of 100 citizens, professional ecologists, NGOs, local communities, grassroots, and governmental authorities attending.
Most of the participants came to the public hearings prepared with arguments, as a social discussion was facilitated on 18 October – called in mass media ‘the alternative public hearings’. More than 40 interested citizens participated in the alternative public hearings and voted to decline the project of constructing the stadium at the right bank of the Kazanka River and rather relocate it to another district of the city without destroying natural heritage. Environmentalists and citizens of the riverfront neighbourhoods agreed to act in coalition of interests if needed.
As a result of the ‘official public hearings’ run on 19 October 2009, the majority of participants including grassroots and NGOs and some academics acted against the change of the General Urban Plan. The main argument of such a position centred across the possible damage to the environment and natural biodiversity in the area. As a result, the majority of participants built up a resolution aiming at denying the stadium construction in the area by citing the General Urban Plan of Kazan according to which the Kazanka River is stated to be ‘the most important for
preserving area of the natural complex of the city’. The citizens requested to relocate the building of the football stadium to another area.
On 21 October, the given resolution was discussed with governmental authorities and the city mayor who called the decision-making process on the subject to be an ideal. However, the official decision of constructing the football stadium at the right bank of the Kazanka River was implemented. The result of such an ‘alternative’ meaning of the ideal decision-making process raised significant criticism from the environmental grassroots and citizens of the riverfront area as the following stakeholder comments demonstrate.
We are most willing to help the government with our knowledge. However, the government does not want to listen to us and are not transparent in their decision-making; it is so hard to get any information about the government proponents plans towards the construction work. (Member of the environmental NGO)
The constructive dialogue was not achieved because the environmental NGOs and grassroots only want to accept that building a stadium is evil, they did not hear us . . .
On that day it was made clear by public authorities to different social groups that the construction of the stadium started months before the public hearings were initiated and that citizens were involved in a ‘false’ dialogue. The actual process of citizen disengagement was disguised by limited time pressure associated with facilitating public hearings.
Subsequently, environmental grassroots and academics collectively initiated a criminal case against the illegal backfill of the right bank of the Kazanka River. Earlier, in July 2009, local Greenpeace sent a petition to the governmental authorities and to the International Olympic Committee on the subject. However, the court accepting all the violations did not find both the customer and the performer of the project, thus no execution was made.
In April 2010, the Russian Federal Agency for Oversight of Natural Resource Usage initiated an examination of the Minister of the Ecology and Natural Resources of the Republic of Tatarstan and discovered the violation of natural legislation during the construction of 2013 Universiade projects. However, in the conclusion of the documents, justifications were provided for such violation.
Despite the lack of support to the citizens’ claim by the law and the construction that was still in progress, some of the stakeholders were optimistic to make the controversial discourse visible to the federal and international audience as the following comment reveals:
Despite it we really moved forward because the violations are acknowledged now and the rhetoric across this case moved to the legislation level. (Member of the environmental NGO)
Along with traditional lines of environmental engagement in the Kazanka River case, citizens started to facilitate social discussions using new media opportunities
through a website called ‘Public control’. The website is a crowdsourcing project in Russia pioneered in Kazan in April 2012.1 Subsequently, city’s tensions were indicated and placed on the interactive map. The conflict is defined to be resolved if people living in the conflict areas are satisfied with the results and the ways in which conflicts were solved. This way, they mark them as resolved in the website’s map. From April 2012 out of 17 different environmental cases initiated by the citizens and placed on the interactive map, one case was dedicated to the Kazanka River (removal of the topsoil) and was fast and successfully solved out by the government and local
As the result of the on-going rhetoric among government officials and different stakeholders in the Kazanka River case, a compromise was found to relocate the stadium construction 100m from the natural reserve as well as to relocate the red book species to other city areas.
In the Time lapse map, one can observe how the right bank of Kazanka River has been changing over the last few years (Figures 1 and 2).
Nowadays, post-socialist Russian cities are facing difficulties in organizing sports mega-events associated with institutional, legislative, infrastructural, and administrative barriers that they need to overcome to comply with the international standards of cities hosting mega-events. One of these problems is the effective engagement of citizens in decision-making who act as the main stakeholder and experience firsthand all the consequences of the mega-events.
Based on the environmental case of the Kazanka River, the research portrayed that despite the variety of forms of the citizens’ engagement in Kazan, the key procedure results cannot be entirely claimed as well-intentioned engagement processes, rather they are ‘fake dialogues’. Despite the widespread use of sporting events in urban development, the degree to which the local community’s voice fits into the plans of a city’s authorized urban plans has been questioned. This became clear in the Kazan case where the citizens were disengaged by apparently involving in the last stage of the decision-making, but the entire decision was made beforehand.
We recognized several factors that caused citizens disengagement in environmental decision-making in Russia.
First of all, the format and technical configurations of the public hearings could make some external boundaries for the efficient decision-making process. The citizens of Kazan noticed that the venue was too small to host a broad audience for public hearings and complained about the complicated bureaucratic procedures associated with the registration to the public hearings.
Second, poor execution of environmental legislation and normalization of the lack of legitimacy could also act as external boundaries for citizen engagement. This could create the feeling of cynicism and fatigue among citizens.
According to national and local surveys, the quality of the environment is among the top five societal problems Russians are concerned about. However, the declared environmental values do not transform much into environmentally sound behaviours. For example, although most Kazan citizens are concerned about the quality of the environment, few participate in environmental activities (Yanitsky 2000; Ermolaeva 2011; and this was verified by one of the interviewees too). In most cases, agents who participate in public hearings are representing minor groups of active citizens or are those who are always rebelling on governmental decisions.
Finally, a majority of Russians are passive and cynical about governmental intent to engage citizens in decision-making. By (re)producing false dialogues between the government and other stakeholders, there is a sense of increased mistrust in the legitimacy and credibility of public policies. At the same time, Russians express paternalistic values and switch the responsibility of a healthy environment from themselves to the governmental officials when it comes to real action.
The gap between a citizen’s environmental concern and the actual environmental engagement, limited time and financial resources, low trust in government proponents, and other related factors can affect each other or in the experiment research terms; they can interact and produce the synergetic affect that make Russian post-socialist cities unique cases and at the same time common to other world cities for future analysis. Indeed, the literature shows that the symbolic attempt to include citizens in the decisionmaking process is a crucial issue with other countries hosting mega-events (Sinclair & Diduck 2000). The main rationale for such a discrepancy is the limited time frame for building the mega-sport infrastructure and the long process needed to hold appropriate public hearings.
The given case portrayed that well-coordinated citizen actions through the organization of (alternative) public hearings, citizen manifestation, initiation of the criminal case, and involvement in crowdsourcing could bring to the political agenda the importance and necessity of the ‘genuine dialogue’. To effectively transform the statusquo of citizen disengagement in post-Soviet Russia into engagement, Kazan citizens employ multi strategies that tackle various public arenas including governmental authorities, Mass Media, NGOs, and the International Olympic Committee. The citizens’ environmental actions were strengthened and lent credibility by building strategic alliances and coalitions with different stakeholder groups. The key successful strategy was to raise public awareness and make the case visible to the national and international audience. This also moved the disengagement discourse into the legislative level and forced governmental authorities to enhance people’s ownership of public policies. In this regard, the given case study could provide a useful benchmark for the international impact assessment communities against which future research on the barriers of citizen (dis)engagement in the environmental decision-making can be analysed and compared.
The author is cordially grateful for the valuable suggestions provided by Prof. Stewart Lockie from the Australian National University and Colin Johnson from the Brown University
This work was supported by the Russian Humanitarian Research Fund under grant ‘social effects of international sports megaevents on local communities in the post-socialist Russian cities’ (the case of the 2013 Universiade in Kazan and the 2014 Olympic Games in Sochi), Project No. 13-03-00430.
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