Ideas for the reform of housing ownership in the early 1990s

I start with policy ideas. I compare the ideas that circulated among the member of the policy network, that is Gosstroy and its advisors, with the ideas shared by policy outsiders during the early 1990s. I also point to the difference in the views of Gosstroy officials before and after their cooperation with international advisors. The summary of these policy views, classified as paradigms, instruments and settings, is offered in Table 4.2.

It is important to note that policy discussion in the 1990s focused around specific instruments and settings of housing policy such as mass housing privatisation. Nevertheless, from these debates, we can infer the broad implicit understandings about the aims and means of Russian housing policy, that is policy paradigms, held by different specialist groups among the Russian housing policy sub-system. In the early 1990s, both the mixed housing paradigm and the owner-occupation paradigm were supported by the members of the housing policy subsystem and there was no agreement about which of the paradigms should be applied. It can be argued then that the issue area of housing ownership represents a dimension of housing policy with a complex paradigmatic choice.

Table 4.2 Policy ideas for the reform of Russian housing ownership structure (paradigms, instruments and settings)