P U B L I C P A R T I C I P A T I O N
"What about public participation in Bulgaria?" I asked Alexander Kodjabashev as we walked the hills above Visegrad during a public participation workshop in Hungary. "Let me tell you a little story," he said.
A dairy was producing milk in an unnamed Bulgarian city. It was also producing pollution at levels 250 times higher than allowable limits. For whatever reason, either apathy or innocence, the citizens in the area didn't move to shut it down, though legal methods provided the means to do so.
Eventually the municipal authorities put a seal on the door and demanded that operations cease. The very next day, the seal was broken and milk, and pollution, flowed from the plant like water. The local prosecutor was informed but did nothing. Three months later, an inspector arrived, not to shut down the plant, but to issue legal proceedings against 7 local officials, including the mayor. Later, 2 of the 7 were punished: the two that put the seal on the dairy. After all of this, the dairy remained open.
This is a microcosm of the public participation situation in CEE. There are legal tools available, but the public sector is either unaware or unwilling to use them. When they are used, low political will and insufficient implementation and enforcement mechanisms often undermine the effort.
But the situation is changing. In CEE, both the legal framework and less formal forms of public pressure are being developed. Most governments have already introduced constitutions and environmental legislation that guarantee citizens, at least in theory, the right to participate in environmental decisionmaking; but an effective implementation infrastructure is lacking. Now, it's just a matter of empowering the public by institutionalizing their right to participate in environmental decisionmaking.
Defining public participation has never been an easy task. In CEE, the term is so new its very definition has been left open to interpretation, an ambiguous phrase that has confounded a populace unused to rolling up their sleeves and getting involved in the decisionmaking process.
Who is the "public" anyway? And what exactly is "participation"?
There is a common belief that the public, often referred to as the "third leg of the stool" (along with government and industry), is synonymous with nongovernmental organizations (NGOs). Policymakers and government officials who don't know any better or have never given the issue a second thought often think that NGOs are representative of the constituency as a whole. This is a mistake.
"NGOs are only one form in which the public is an actor. Universities, trade unions, citizens are also active in a number of other ways," says Daniel Siegel, co-author of The Birth of Civil Society, published with support from the Rockefeller Brothers Fund.
In fact, environmental NGOs are less representative of the broad swath of public opinion than most democratic governments. Politicians are elected, and by that token are considered to represent their constituents. Not so NGOs; they are self-appointed messiahs bent on pursuing specific, though usually philanthropic, agendas.
"NGOs...often say they represent the public's views," explains Tim Murphy, head of environmental appraisal at the EBRD, "but there is little evidence to date [to suggest] that...NGO membership in CEE countries is sufficiently large for this claim to be substantiated."
Perhaps the best way to approach the issue is to adopt Lubica Trubiniova's multi-tiered approach. From her perch as a campaigner for Greenpeace Slovakia, she sees public participation as having four basic levels. The first is quite simple: the public in general has access to information and is able to recognize problems. The second is the critical analysis of the situation, cooperating with state authorities and businesses to come up with solutions.
Trubiniova's model then describes a scenario where the public, usually in the form of NGOs, takes part directly in the process of developing policy and legislation that will prevent environmental concerns from becoming problems. The highest level of public participation occurs when citizen groups take part in direct decisionmaking at all levels.
"There is a difference between citizen participation and NGO participation. [Citizen-based] participation is bottom -up and NGO involvement is top-down. But both are necessary," says Magdolna Toth Nagy, coordinator of the REC's public participation project.
Despite the semantic confusion over the term "public," it is clear NGOs must play a leading role in the development of a sound public participation process. They are the logical extension of a growing public concern for environmental issues; they serve as the impetus for increasing public awareness; and they unite individuals into powerful lobbying groups that can both police and cooperate with governments and industry to address environmental concerns.
The most important reason for public participation is to increase respect for final decisions; it legitimizes decisionmaking, says Stephen Stec, a CEELI lawyer working on the REC's public participation volumes. "It empowers people. They are elevated to the same level as decisionmakers."
The basic legal framework meant to ensure this equilibrium has already been established in every country within the REC's mandate, indicating that governments are making an effort to institutionalize public participation. In almost every case, new constitutions ensure that citizens have the right to shape their political and environmental landscapes by providing fundamental rights - of expression, of information, of free assembly, of appeal - necessary for public participation.
Legislation specific to the environment has also arrived, usually in the form of environmental protection acts. Many see one aspect of this, the environmental impact assessment (EIA), as the best opportunity for the public to impact the environmental decisionmaking process.
EIAs analyze how certain activities, such as a new uranium mine or refitted manufacturing plant, will impact the environment. They allow for public participation during the actual assessment and in the drafting of reports, and can be used to curtail activities or stop them altogether. In Lithuania, citizens used the EIA process to influence the location of an oil terminal on the Baltic coast. Not once, but twice the proposed site was rejected because of public pressure. A site was eventually chosen near the Latvian border.
Because of public pressure, the EBRD used EIAs as an integral part of its bid to provide loans necessary to fit the unfinished nuclear power plant near Mochovce, Slovakia with Western technology. Public demonstrations were held to protest against the power plant and official meetings allowed locals to influence policymakers and their decisions.
But EIAs are not the only answer to the public participation question. As Stec points out, "EIAs tend to put all your eggs in one basket. They only occur under certain circumstances concerning new projects. Old polluters can carry on for years before they are noticed, if they ever are." In effect, EIAs can be used by governments to silence boisterous critics.
Some have suggested this was the case in Slovakia, where the government and EBRD appeared to involve the public in the discussions about the Mochovce nuclear power plant. In the end, they never really considered the public's comments. Toth Nagy called it a "facade."
Other legal tools available in CEE include land use planning and permitting. They provide excellent opportunities for the public to become involved in urban planning on a short-term, local level, says Stec. Participants can decide how land is to be used, whether it should be the site of a new furniture factory or whether it wouldn't be better zoned as park or nature conservation area. In most cases, however, public participation provisions in these areas are absent or vague and need to be strengthened, says Toth Nagy.
While some larger NGOs are tackling policy issues, most public participation takes place at the grassroot level. Citizens are organizing themselves into groups to protest harmful developments, clean-up polluted rivers and beaches and develop environmental education campaigns. Both are necessary and, indeed, effective, but a lack of awareness on participation issues is probably the single biggest hurdle to increasing public involvement.
In Bulgaria, for instance, the public is virtually in the dark with respect to regulations governing the environment. Bulgaria has legislation that allows for the public to participate through EIAs, but only the officials in the ministry of environment seem to know the details, says Alexander Kodjabashev, a lawyer from Sofia who is writing the Bulgarian chapter of the REC's report on the status of public participation.
"NGOs and citizens don't always know they have the right to take part in public discussion. And if [these opportunities] aren't offered, they don't know they have the right to appeal."
The problem, he says, is that state officials don't feel responsible for disseminating information to the public. The regulations are published in the official journals, and that is where they stay unless someone asks about relevant environmental legislation. There is simply no tradition treating education as the state's obligation.
Tatiana Kluvankova, co-author of the REC's public participation status report for Slovakia, paints a similar picture in her homeland, only she shifts some of the responsibility from the state to the individual.
"There is a very low public awareness of the legal framework. People don't know their rights and duties, and they are not interested," she says. "There is simply no willingness to learn the legal system or to be active in the process."
Though environmental apathy is on the upswing in CEE, it hasn't always been that way. According to Kluvankova, a 1990 poll in Slovakia showed that 20 percent of the population would vote "green" given the chance - now, the percentage of environmentally sympathetic constituents has dropped to 0.5 percent. In Lithuania, as in many CEE countries, the green movement was a significant factor in the country's bid for independence, a rallying point around which people could lobby for political change. But that too has waned.
The key to improving public participation and indeed public concern for the environment is increasing access to information. It's integral to the development of the public participation process. Citizens cannot hope to influence decisions about which they know nothing about. Most experts agree that government agencies are responsible for gathering and disseminating information of all types, not just on the environment.
"If the government doesn't allow the public access to information, they are denying them the right to participate," says Stec emphatically.
Governments must force private investors and project sponsors to submit data related to potentially polluting activities. And once the information is collected, they must make it available to everyone.
Under Hungarian law, section 20 of Act LXIII "requires the government agency to deliver requested data within fifteen days, or to notify the requester that the data is secret within eight days," according to the REC's Manual on Public Participation in Environmental Decisionmaking. A recent "test" of the system proved successful. We asked for a variety of documents, from a copy of the new Environmental Protection Law to environmental reports for the five worst polluting companies in Hungary. Despite the usual bureaucracy, the helpful individual on the phone assured us it was all available if we would just fax him a request.
There are barriers standing in the way of a lazy afternoon spent in your most comfortable easy chair reading environmental reports. Whether or not reliable and accurate information is even available is often an issue. Either no one is gathering it, inspectors can't get it because of legal restrictions or lack of resources, or much of what has been stored is withheld as "secret." If you do happen to get your hands on the information you want, it may be written in a virtually unintelligible legalese.
EBRD's Tim Murphy points to another problem: "There is an evident problem now in some CEE countries of data which has been collected by public agencies being sold, often very expensively to those undertaking environmental investigations." This twist on the capitalist spirit obviously limits access by underfunded NGOs and private citizens with few available resources.
Stec characterizes access to information as "rather weak" throughout the Region: "Almost every country has legal mechanisms in principle but they don't always have the mechanisms in place to implement them; then they use lack of resources as an excuse."
Governments need to be more aware of the importance and necessity of information to the maintenance of a healthy environment, and citizens need to be more active in requesting that information and raising their own awareness levels. The adoption of the "Guidelines on Access to Information and Public Participation in Environmental Decisionmaking" at the Sofia ministerial conference will help improve the situation, says Toth Nagy.
Despite ongoing criticism, it is obvious that public participation in environmental decisionmaking has come a long, long way over the last five years. "Five years ago there was no public participation process," says Kluvankova. Now, at least, citizens can work toward developing a better one.
Of course, assessments differs from country to country, and the extent to which the situation has changed is difficult to quantify. Some countries, especially the Visegrad Four and the Baltic countries, are well on their way to implementing rudimentary systems that ensure practical public participation; others, like Albania and Macedonia, have been slow to implement such procedures. In every country it will take years, maybe even an entire generation, before legislation is understood and informal methods of participation are institutionalized.
There are indications that a recent decline in reformer enthusiasm has hurt the "green movement"; the amendment to the EIA law in Bulgaria is just one example of an ex-communist government trying to retard the changes it so hungrily embraced just a short time ago.
But even in Bulgaria, the story can have a happy ending. Remember the dairy that seemed immune to the law? It was finally closed down - with the help of a little public pressure.