International aid projects in post-communist countries were meant to support environmental protection during the transition period and to introduce new standards of environmental governance. While the outcomes of the World Bank biodiversity project in the Belavezhskaya Pushcha National Park in Belarus were evaluated positively after its delayed completion, an assessment using the same criteria 10 years later questioned its long-term effectiveness. This paper links current project outcomes with the implementation process, and uses this knowledge to deduce lessons for designing and implementing future international initiatives in Belarus and other post-communist contexts. There are four interlinked and project-specific reasons for the observed unsustainability of project outcomes are identified: (1) the predominance of the natural sciences, (2) an unbalanced representation of actors within the hierarchical system of governance, (3) powerful implementation by official high-level actors, and (4) insufficient knowledge of participatory methods and principles of multi-level governance. In order to introduce new standards for environmental governance, international aid projects should (1) streamline communications between the actors at different scales, including donor organizations, local agencies and stakeholders in the receiving countries; and (2) use ongoing project and, in particular, process assessment to reflect on the project progress to achieve longer term effectiveness of project outcomes.

We examine the question of whether economic winners were more likely to support European Union (EU) membership than economic losers in post-communist countries. We include in our analysis every cross-national survey of post-communist countries with both a measure of individual attitudes toward EU membership as well as an appropriate measure of individual self-assessment of economic progress. The resultant data set contains data from 67 different surveys over a 12-year period (1991–2003) in all 10 post-communist countries that have joined the EU to date. Using a variety of analytical techniques, ranging from simple cross-tables and multivariate analysis of the individual surveys to multilevel models of a fully pooled data set, we show that the pattern of economic winners being more likely to support EU membership for their country is remarkably consistent across both time and space. At the same time, the dynamic component of the analysis allows us to show that the size of this gap varies over time, with winners being even more likely to support EU membership than losers when EU membership is a more realistic possibility.

Given far-reaching changes in the legal systems of East Central Europe since the mid-1990s, one might expect administrative court judges to have modified the way in which they decide cases, in particular by embracing less formalistic adjudication strategies. Relying on an original dataset of over one thousand business-related cases from the Czech Republic, Hungary and Poland, this article shows that – despite some variation across countries and time – judges have largely failed to respond to the incentives contained in the new constitutional frameworks. They continue to adopt the most-locally-applicable-rule approach and are reluctant to apply general principles of law or to rely on Dworkinian ‘policies’ in deciding hard cases. The analysis links these weak institutional effects to the role of constitutional courts, case overload and educational legacies.