Drawn from a 2002 conference on sustainable development in Central Europe, the papers in this volume range from airy reflections on climate change to highly technical studies of transition economics and tax policy. After a summary introduction by the editors and an impressionistic reflection by Robert Wilkinson on Central Europe's capacity for economic and environmental reform, the book has four sections, devoted to environmental policy, the economics of sustainable development, water policy, and rural development. Because it is not possible to adequately summarize fifteen papers here, this review will highlight one paper from each section.

In a thoughtful article on environmental reform in Central Europe, Stacy VanDeveer and JoAnn Carmin consider the role of the European Union (EU), both through direct aid and the goal of membership, in fostering policy changes and institutions related to environmental amelioration and stewardship. They conclude that during the first five years after the collapse of Communism, individual governments and global environmental nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) had the largest impact on environmental “capacity development” (45) in Central Europe. After 1995, the aspiration and then accession to the EU played a larger role. The authors conclude with a summary of the major organizational challenges (circa 2004) still facing countries like Poland and the Czech Republic, which have just made their formal entry into the EU. Readers will have to look to more recent publications to determine how the environment and environmental policy have fared under actual membership in the EU.

Part two focuses on economic incentives for promoting environmental sustainability. A ponderous but intriguing article by Olga Kiuila and Jerzy Śleszyński models several possible tax reform scenarios and concludes that a “green tax reform,” if properly structured, would improve, rather than discourage, economic and social development. All the scenarios assume the redistribution of the tax burden to activities and products that cause a negative environmental impact. The two most promising scenarios involve either a significant reduction in social security taxes or subsidies to individual families.

The third and largest section of the book examines water policy in Central and Eastern Europe. Eszter Gulácsy, László Pintér, and Jim Perry consider the complex transnational implications of a large spill of cyanide-laced wastewater from a Romanian gold and silver mine in 2000. The spill flowed through a tributary into the Tisza River in Hungary and eventually into the Danube in northern Serbia. Though both Romania and Hungary had institutions in place to deal with environmental regulation and mitigation, communication between them was poor and liability law was not well designed to discourage or punish transborder pollution. Though the authors stress the importance of individual actors in carrying out (or failing to carry out) environmental policy, their conclusions emphasize the importance of institutions and legal frameworks. As with other papers in this volume, it seems likely that EU membership would have substantially changed the environmental policies involved.

The final section of the book, on sustainable community development, is the least social scientific and the most engaging for the general reader. The four essays in this section take to heart recent trends in both scholarship and environmental policy that focus on the local within national and global contexts. Anthony Amato's engagingly written article on the Hutsul region of Ukraine shows how “inhabitants and nature in the mountains are intertwined in a host of shifting exchanges and relationships” (183). In a finely calibrated ecological and human history, Amato shows how cattle herding, agriculture, and nonhuman biological actors combined to form the distinctive, seemingly wild, landscapes typical of the Hutsul region. Though threatened by poaching and illegal timber harvesting, the Hutsul “working landscape” has elements of economic and ecological sustainability that, as Amato concludes, government policy could and should encourage. He ends with a plea to avoid one-size-fits-all explanations for environmental degradation (the Communist legacy) or uniform solutions to environmental and economic problems. Instead, policy for a sustainable future in the Carpathians should draw on the local historical context and the knowledge and distinct needs of local inhabitants.

The subject of this volume is of crucial importance to the past, present, and future of Central and Eastern Europe. The region has deeply rooted industrial, consumer economies (both because of and in spite of the Communist legacy), making sustainable development as much of a puzzle as it has been throughout the industrialized world. This book looks at a range of pieces of this puzzle, some quite intricate and others quite general. Central and Eastern European economies, politics, and institutions have changed rapidly over the past twenty years. Naturally, some of the conclusions and recommendations found in a conference volume like this are out of date about as quickly as they reach print. For those who work on environmental policy in Central Europe and other regions of economic and political transition, some of these articles could prove useful. General readers—even those with environmental interests—will find many of the chapters jargon-filled and tedious.