Maurer School of Law: Indiana University Digital Repository @ Maurer Law Articles by Maurer Faculty Faculty Scholarship 1995 Poland's Progress: Environmental Protection in a Period of Transition Daniel H. Cole Indiana University Maurer School of Law,
[email protected] Follow this and additional works at: https://www.repository.law.indiana.edu/facpub Part of the Environmental Law Commons, and the European Law Commons Recommended Citation Cole, Daniel H., "Poland's Progress: Environmental Protection in a Period of Transition" (1995). Articles by Maurer Faculty. 2104. https://www.repository.law.indiana.edu/facpub/2104 This Article is brought to you for free and open access by the Faculty Scholarship at Digital Repository @ Maurer Law. It has been accepted for inclusion in Articles by Maurer Faculty by an authorized administrator of Digital Repository @ Maurer Law. For more information, please contact
[email protected]. Article Poland's Progress: Environmental Protection in a Period of Transition DANIEL H. COLE* I. INTRODUCTION Poland's first post-communist government inherited a combined economic and ecological crisis of immense proportions. 1 At the beginning of 1990, it initiated an unprecedented political-economic transformation designed to establish liberal democratic institutions and a market-based economic system. Many expected that these reforms would promote improved environmental protection, e.g., by hardening budget constraints on polluters. 2 But they also feared that free markets could aggravate existing environmental problems and * Associate Professor, Indiana University School of Law at Indianapolis. I am grateful to John Clark, Paul Cox, Piotr Glifiski, Michael Heise, Jurek Jendro~ka, and David Papke for their comments on drafts of this article, and to my research assistant Rafal Ofierski for his excellent work.