Improving Capacities of Stakeholders
The purpose of the Component 5 is to improve capacities of the stakeholders in proper management and maintenance of the environmental integrity of the SBTWs. This activity is critically important for achieving the second specific project objective. The key challenge of the Component 5 is in building an appropriate capacity of authorities, business and citizen institutions on Strategic Environmental Assessment (SEA) as a key prerequisite for the reinforcement of environmental integrity in the SBTWs with particular focus on the stipulations of the EU WFD, MSP, Espoo and Helsinki Conventions.
The capacity building of the regional authorities, business companies and NGOs in the management and maintenance of the environmental integrity of all the cross-border SBTW regions will be based on an interactive training following “learning by doing” and “experts to experts” principles, when all participants are involved into the common action, mutually benefiting from the upgraded skills. This methodology of the capacity building will closely follow the “interactive think-tank” approach, which was developed by the Milieukontakt Oosteuropa for the institutional strengthening of the Central and Eastern European institutions and successfully applied in several cross-border cooperation projects by the EUCC Baltic Office.
Based on the knowledge available from the Good Practice Code of Conduct, different groups of trainees, particularly the non-governmental environmental organizations, citizen and industry target groups will be trained to take active part in the cross-border SEA of potentials, values, threats and possible conflicts of the development projects within the four SBTWs. They will strengthen their skills during interactive training sessions and, most critically important, during the exchange visits to other SBTW areas. As a result, project stakeholders active in TWSNs will get acquainted in practice with the reinforcement of the environmental integrity of all four SBTW areas.
The capacity building progress will be periodically highlighted at open public events or in a form of specific communication efforts within Component 2 to the broader target groups in the SBA. As a consequence, the broader use of ARTWEI knowledge building tools by the environmentally-concerned community in the SBA and in the entire BSR is anticipated following the snow-ball principle.
Therefore, Component 5 facilitates the implementation of the EU WFD, MSP, Espoo and Helsinki Convention requirements in the SBA by informing and involving the public into the SEA process with strong relevance for the cross-border approach in the TW management.
