Our Objectives

The project “Development of the ENV.net in West Balkan and Turkey: giving citizens a voice to influence the environmental process reforms for closer EU integration” builds on the experience of a EU-funded project, namely the Environment Forum, implemented in the period 2009-2012, aiming at developing capacities of environmental NGOs to establish a constructive dialogue with national authorities.
The project purpose is to achieve a greater commitment and capacity of the ENV.net partners to give citizens a voice and influence public sector reform processes in the environment sector through analysis, monitoring and advocacy and in welcoming the standards of the environment acquis.
The project strategy is organised around concentric circles: in fact it is  foreseen to start working on strengthening the capacity of the ENV.net partners organisations (1st circle) in analysing, monitoring, advocacy on the environment issues. After this phase the partners will be able to share their experiences and knowledge with other Environment CSOs of their countries (2nd circle) and the project will also support them with training sessions and with the development of a interactive website and a helpdesk. At this point the CSOs of each country will be ready to promote the awareness around the environment sensitive issues among the civil society (3rd circle), so that it would be possible to improve the dialogue and to influence national governments, the EU Institutions and other possible relevant stakeholders in adopting specific policies to facilitate the process of the approximation to the Environment acquis and improve the environment and the power of the CSOs.

Strategy

The project strategy is expected to consolidate the ENV.net partners’ role in fostering the state-civil society dialogue at national and regional levels, in analysing and monitoring the on going process reforms and finally at providing actual opportunities to give citizens and CSOs a voice in the environmental reform process and in the integration with EU.

The improved dialogue civil society – state institutions is the key expected impact of the action, as a result of the dissemination of more information on the EU environmental acquis and of greater opportunities for information and experience sharing. This will also have an impact on the awareness of the single citizens of the ongoing reforms and on ownership of the dialogue with the state institutions.

The three phases of the project:

  • Inception phase Get to know better each other: this phase has been concluded at the end of May 2013 with the collection of findings from a critical mapping exercise which was useful to identify existing CSOs working in the environment sector in each partner’s country and analyse their representativeness in the civil society, the relationships among them and with the national authorities or specialized agency.  Read more about the outcome of this mapping exercise in the dedicated page
  • Phase one How to work with CSOs: this phase is focused on informing CSOs on the key aspects and relevant on-going initiative towards the approximation to the environment acquis, in order to identify possible area for collaboration in joint actions.
  • Phase two Working with CSOs for a structured dialogue: in this phase starting in the 2nd year of the project, the team will organise, in collaboration with other identified stakeholders in each partner’s country, some public events and specific national conference to improve the awareness on the sensitive issues and possible gaps in the approximation to the environment acquis, promote public actions to faster achieve this objective and influence, with the sustain of the civil society, some positive changes in the governments reforms. Moreover at least one regional web-conference (or webinar) will be organised for the benefit of CSOs and other relevant stakeholders of the Western Balkans and Turkey.

What we do in practise?

Check out the ENV.net blog section to see what’s new and where we stand.