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environmental quality standards (Söderholm et al. 2015). In general, while Russia has established major
revisions to its legal framework, the changes have remained minor in practice (Pettersson et al. 2015).
In the Russian context, the lack of predictability of the regulatory system, the absence of coordination
between the authorities and vagueness of competence across levels of authority are creating problems
(Söderholm et al. 2015).
In Russia, the conditions on EIA are defined under the Federal Law on environmental Protection,
published in 2002, and the Federal Law on environmental expert review (or Law on Environmental Expertise
1995). According to Russian legislation, mining projects need to pass environmental expertise to
prevent possible environmental impacts. In Russia the EIA (or so-called OVOS procedure) is one of
the main components of the Environmental expert process, and assesses the impacts of a potential
development, while the Environmental expertise is a process of reviewing the results and
documentation of the assessment (Solodyankina & Koeppel 2009; Cherp & Golubeva 2004).
Guidelines for EIA are determined in the Act on implementation of Environmental Impact
Assessments (2000). Public participation is considered as an integral part of the EIA process. In 2006,
the law was amended so that the definition of an environmental impact no longer includes ‘related
social, economic and other project impacts’ (Wilson & Swiderska 2009). The demand from civil society
to take part in the decision making process is quite insignificant (Fifka & Pobizhan 2014; Polishchuk
2009; Riabova & Didyk 2014). The relative scarcity of people’s activity and undeveloped mechanisms
of interaction has led to the formal implementation of the public participation processes.
Social acceptability of mining
The growing emphasis