| This dissertation examines the political economy of the post-Soviet transition to markets as manifested in the resource-rich forest economy of Khabarovsk krai (province) in the Russian Far East. It considers the changes that followed the decentralization of political-economic authority in Khabarovsk krai's forest sector, with the consequent local and provincial state struggles for control over the forest resources, and concomitant globalization of the krai's extractive industry, as foreign capital arrived to harvest and export the forest resources.; Spurred by western neoliberal policies of decentralization, privatization, and economic liberalization, the krai administration invited foreign investment to help rebuild the forest sector and speed its integration into the neighboring timber markets of the Pacific Rim, in exchange for access to the province's vast forest resources. Rather than a nascent capitalist economy predicated on the familiar terms of a western free-market system, however, Khabarovsk's forest sector was characterized by dynamic sets of political, economic, and social relationships and interests that were conflicting, flexible, and discretionary. The American partners in the four Russian-American joint ventures studied found the rules to be different, processes of participation situational, and everything was negotiable. The Russians found no economic and industrial savior in the market transition that proved instead to be inequitable, arrogant, and colonial. This local political economy defined the processes of the transition in the forest sector, the flow of benefits, and the ability of players to tap into them.; Some foreign investors were able to navigate the divide between the promise and the practical reality of the transition; others exited the market altogether. Ten years into the transition, however, the krai's forest industry was becoming an extractive resource arm of the industrial Pacific Rim. The promises and expectations of economic growth and prosperity for many had evolved into the creation of localized enclaves of global economic opportunity for a few, the benefits of which were largely excluded from the local social and economic spheres. This dissertation is an effort to understand how these processes unfolded at one site of the market transformation, as a roundly-held faith in theoretical promises dissolved in the face of practical local realities of social, political, and economic interest, need, and opportunity. |
