Authors

Miriam Pollock¹;  ¹ University College London, UK

Discussion

This paper analyses local government-business relations in contemporary Russia through a case study of the city of Noril’sk. A remote monotown in the Arctic, Noril’sk is home to Nornickel, a resource-extraction and production corporation and one of the largest companies in Russia. Most interactions between business and local governments take place in the context of Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) programmes and Public-Private Partnerships (PPP). In Russia, such interactions are further filtered through the prism of the ‘power vertical’, describing how Putin exerts control over sub-national levels of government. Drawing on press releases, annual reports, news articles and other open-source media, I use Nornickel’s CSR and PPP projects to investigate whether the city and company tend to collaborate or clash, and whether either party is able to wield power and control over the other. I determine that Nornickel has far more power than local government due to a disparity of financial resources and the co-optation of local authorities, issues which are especially prevalent in monotowns, or single-industry towns. This finding substantiates arguments that companies use CSR to maintain and expand power over local communities and problematizes the dominant idea that the state exercises more control over Russian businesses than the reverse. These results also contribute a more nuanced understanding of the ways in which the ‘power vertical’ operates at the local level.