Strategic Moves - Regional Environmental Center for Central and ...

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C H A P T E R 9
T H E WAY F O R WA R D
S T R AT E G I C M O V E S
• Domestic budgetary funds are also of huge importance for providing national
co-financing for projects, for which a big share is financed from EU or bilateral
grants and/or IFIs.
• Planning for approximation, including accompanying investments, should become
even more important.
• In a situation in which budgets are tight and needs are big, there is a need to
streamline available resources in order to avoid overlapping and wasting resources
between institutions and on low-priority projects.
• Advantage should also be taken of the subsidies available, particularly from EU
programmes and bilateral donors, which can ease affordability problems.
Legal
Although progress has been made during the last four years there is still a relatively
low level of transposition of many of the key investment-heavy directives,
and the level of transposition varies significantly between the candidate countries
and the others. Some of the countries still lack approximation strategies.
Way forward
• Rushing transposition may lead to low-quality national legislation without
proper planning of the necessary human and financial resources. The availability
of approximation strategies is of great importance. These should define
feasible transposition and implementation dates that are linked to the real legal
and political situation.
• It is important to adopt high-quality, functional legislation that will not require
too much modification in the future.
• The EU environmental acquis has significant financial, institutional and enforcement
implications that must be planned for in advance in order to guarantee
enforcement.
• It is beneficial for countries to use existing guidance documents, such as the EC
guidance document and the EC Handbook on the Implementation of EU Environmental
Legislation.
Enforcement
The level of enforcement of environmental legislation in the region is low due to the
weak capacity of the inspectorates and long years of a legal vacuum in the field of environment.
Enforcement is no less important than transposition, as some of the new water
or waste management systems would not function properly without a sufficient level of
enforcement of the legislation. The links between different inspectorates and between
the inspectorates, police and prosecution are weak. There is little awareness on the part
of companies and citizens of the importance of compliance with environmental legislation,
which makes the inspectors’ obligations even more difficult to implement.