Authors

Discussion

The literature on environmental politics and regional governance has mainly been dedicated to the role played by the European Union (EU). The analysis of environmental agenda and politics of post-Soviet regional international organisations (IOs) (e.g., Russia-led Eurasian Development Bank, Eurasian Economic Union (EAEU), and the China-led the Shanghai Cooperation Organization SCO etc.) remained in the shadows in the studies of environmental regional governance. This paper addresses the following questions: How do these various actors (such as regional Russia-led and China-led IOs) matter in promoting and sustaining an environmental agenda? What challenges do they face? The first perspective developed is the analysis of European IOs as a point of comparative analysis (e.g., the EU, the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development) and newly emerged Eurasian IOs (e.g., the EAEU, EDB, and SCO). The second perspective unfolds various environmental issues as presented and discussed in the discourse of legal documents and of social media of selected regional IO in Eurasia (involving discourse analysis). The analysis of these two perspectives discloses multiple dimensions in the interconnection of certain “environmental influence” of the EU on Eurasian regional and non-regional IOs on sustainable development through such mechanisms as imitation, rhetorical discourse, diffusion of certain values (but not actual policies neither implementation). The paper aspires to shed more light on the nexus of political and economic developments, and to contribute to better understanding of the role of variety of international organizations in sustainable development in Eastern Central Europe and Eurasia, considering external influences from the EU on Eurasia, on the one hand, and from the China on some Eurasian states, on the other hand.