On December 13, Ellie Martus, a co-fund fellow at the University of Warwick, visited ISET to talk about environmental state capacity in Georgia and other countries of the former Soviet Union. She presented an overview of her research, under the framework of which she is going to explore the capacity of Georgia, Russia, Ukraine, and Armenia to design, implement and enforce environmental policies.

Ellie Martus analyzed Georgia’s environmental state capacity in four dimensions: regulation, administration, ideas and expert knowledge, and sites of contestation. With the help of surveys and interviews among governmental entities, NGOs, and environmental groups, she revealed several challenges in all of the above-mentioned dimensions and presented her results to the ISET community. She finished by giving general tentative recommendations and explained that the final conclusions will be shown later, as she is going to continue her research on the topic in Georgia and other select post-Soviet countries.