E. Europe
Eastern Europe
Environmental Policy & Environmental Education in Eastern Europe & Russia
This page describes the main programmes that Powerful Information
ran in Eastern Europe. It provides an overview of the problems that we identified and describes what we did to address them and what we achieved. Some of the lessons we learned during this work are described and analysed on subsequent pages.
The Problem: Poverty blights the lives of millions in Eastern Europe, and especially in rural areas (which is where Powerful Information
focused its attention). We started our work in the region in 1992, shortly after the collapse of the Soviet Union (in Dec 1991), and many of the places that we visited seemed rundown, with people tired and demoralised. For example in Romania we found very little in the shops, and social and other services struggling to cope — life was particularly difficult for orphans and people with disabilities who had been locked away for years in in-human, poorly-funded state institutions. The situation in the neighbouring Moldova Republic was if anything worse.
People were also seriously concerns about the state of the environment: a World Bank
report on Romania, published at the time, identified many pollution ‘hot spots’ — not least Copsa Mica (lead/carbon black), Baia Mare (heavy metals), Zlatna (aluminium smelter), Ploiesti (hydrocarbons) and Borzest (pesticides). It also reported nitrate levels in rivers exceeding government limits in all but two of the country’s 41 districts, and carcinogenic substances in some 32; and the report estimated that 500-600 new cases of silicosis were being diagnosed each year amongst workers in the mines and foundries.
In the villages we found that many of the most able people had moved away, and with few job opportunities (apart from labouring) the young were leaving in droves, with many going abroad. This left many family farms looked after by men and women approaching or beyond retirement age, surviving on low incomes or a meagre state pension. Birthrates had fallen, and divorce and suicide rates were rising. Many citizens were in poor health or depressed; and alcohol abuse was prevalent. Moreover, villages seemed to have lost or were fast losing the traditions and customs that once made them distinctive and brought real pride and satisfaction to community life. It was a bleak picture.
In the villages we found that many of the most able people had moved away, and with few job opportunities (apart from labouring) the young were leaving in droves, with many going abroad. This left many family farms looked after by men and women approaching or beyond retirement age, surviving on low incomes or a meagre state pension. Birthrates had fallen, and divorce and suicide rates were rising. Many citizens were in poor health or depressed; and alcohol abuse was prevalent. Moreover, villages seemed to have lost or were fast losing the traditions and customs that once made them distinctive and brought real pride and satisfaction to community life. It was a bleak picture.
What we did: A priority for us was to help disadvantaged communities respond to their situation and the newly emerging threats posed by globalisation and climate change. We concentrated on building the capacity and professionalism of local groups and improving environmental education in local schools, and over the years we co-organised more than 100 workshops and public meetings to train activists and teachers and raise awareness of key social and environmental issues.
In April 1994 we worked with an environmental group in Ploiesti, Oamenii si Mediul Inconjurator, to organise our first workshop. This focused on energy policy, and we followed this with some high level workshops on recycling — we even brought a delegation of environmentalists, academics and local authority people over to the UK to visit materials recycling plant, composing facilities, and landfill gas sites, and meet with practitioners and policy-makers.[1] And we prepared an NGO Resource Pack and a variety of teaching materials, and ran residential and other workshops on information management and organisational development.
A key element in this programme involved exploring with teachers ways of making environmental education more interesting to stimulate their students into taking more of an interest in their communities and the local environment. We found school curricula rather theoretical and teachers not good at linking lessons to real-life challenges and dilemmas. Indeed, many relied on ‘chalk-and-talk’ and rote learning, and this did little to engage students and encourage creative thought, strategic thinking and personal initiative. We called the programme ‘Preparing Students for Responsible Citizenship’ and ran this for a number of years before extending it to schools in Moldova, Ukraine and Albania, and a key element in this work was initiating and resourcing dozens of student environmental projects.
Here’s a brief summary of some of our other projects:
- we brought together four leading environmental NGOs to produce and disseminate a Guide on Environmental Performance Indicators. This explained inter alia how to plan a project evaluation and described the various steps involved in evaluating performance, outputs and outcomes; and we tested this out on four actual projects;
- we worked with a major British consultancy on a ‘Local Agenda 21’ initiative in Romania which aimed to enhance the development and implementation of local sustainable strategies and involve local communities/stakeholders in environmental decision-making and in delivering successful micro-projects;
- we worked with one of the leading environmental groups in Moscow to improve the effectiveness of local authorities and environmental NGOs involved in providing environmental information and advice to the Russian public. This including organising two residential workshops (in Moscow & Perm) and preparing a range of training materials — 24 people took part, nine from municipalities (Committees on Ecology & Natural Resources) or academic establishments, and the rest (15) from NGOs;
- in Lithuania we collaborated with the Lithuanian Women Farmers’ Association in Kaunas to build networks of village based community groups able to look after their most disadvantaged citizens and ensure their access to healthcare services and potable water, and also to create opportunities for teenagers. This involved working with/training 50 local group coordinators/community leaders and several hundred local people and supporting community projects in more than a dozen deprived communities across the country;
- we worked with a leading environmental NGO in Tirana, the EDEN Center, to carry out a major investigation into lead recycling and lobbied to get the Government to reconsider its options for complying with an EU directive on recycling which would have reduced recycling rates[2];
- we also collaborated with RASP (a rural development NGO) and the Kukes Farmers’ Federation on a project in one of the poorest regions (the North East) to investigate the sustainable production of medicinal and culinary plants and demonstrate that cultivation could provide a viable alternative to the collection of wild herbs.[3] Our colleagues ran growth trials on four demonstration plots (with some 75,000 seedlings); and trained 112 farmers from four communes; we also trained 24 biology teachers from local schools, supported four micro-projects (including setting up two herb gardens), and produced and distributed various educational materials, 300 copies of a poster on medicinal herbs, and a short training video (that was shown on local TV).
One of our most ambitious projects involved identifying ten bona fide
groups in Moldova, Ukraine and Albania, and working with them to develop a set of sound project proposals designed to empower and support local communities that were facing serious environmental problems. Over the course of the project we contacted and visited over 40 groups — as well as government offices, environmental protection agencies, city halls, schools and funders active in the region; and we conducted one-to-one coaching sessions with local partners; ran eight training workshops; and researched 16 project ideas in depth; we then worked with their sponsors to develop 10 of these into viable project proposals.
Sadly, we had to conclude our work in the region in late 2014 when we were no longer able to raise funds to support these kind of grassroots projects.
Sadly, we had to conclude our work in the region in late 2014 when we were no longer able to raise funds to support these kind of grassroots projects.
What we Achieved: Over the years we helped build or strengthen the capacity and effectiveness of over 60 NGOs and CBOs in Russia and eight former Eastern Bloc countries, most notably Albania, Lithuania, Moldova and Romania. This included empowering many with the knowledge and skills with which to develop new projects and also to evaluate the effectiveness of their information work and assess its impact on their main target groups (policy-makers, journalists, teachers, other NGOs, etc.). Six of the 10 new environmental project proposals that we helped local groups develop succeeded in obtaining grants totalling some $205,000. More specifically:
- we trained 300 school teachers, and supported over 80 student environmental projects — 12 projects in Romania went on to win regional or national prizes;
- we brought together senior policy-makers in Russia involved in the collection, processing and dissemination of environmental information and helped set up an informal network for sharing information with NGOs and improving public education programmes;
- we helped more than a dozen disadvantaged communities in Lithuania set up local projects that improved water and health services / local medpunktas (health centres), directly benefitting over 700 individuals — indeed, nine community nurses become actively involved in their community groups as a result. Over the course of the programme over 2,000 local citizens, including many young people, attended the public meetings that we organised — and four teenagers visited the UK after attending the workshops and summer camps that our colleagues organised and ran.
- Our project on the cultivation of medicinal herbs in Albania was particularly successful: herb exporters, who analysed samples of the plot-grown herbs confirmed a better quality of product with a higher concentration of essential oils and offered increased prices (up 7-11% depending on the herb). The work contributed to improving understanding of how rare medicinal plants can be cultivated, and went some way towards changing public attitudes to local practices that had done so much to damage biodiversity after strict controls were relaxed following the demise and death of Enver Hoxha.
Captions
a) Typical landscape in southern Moldova.
b) Delegation of Romanian waste management specialists visiting a large landfill gas site in Bedfordshire, England.
c) Workshop in Perm (Russian Urals) which brought together grassroots NGOs and local authorities to improve the exchange of environmental information.
d) Roma in Shkoder collecting scrap; lead furness in Dures recovering lead from lead acid batteries and other sources of scrap.
e) Camelia (Prietenii Pamantului, Galati, Romania) at work with local majors at one of our workshops in southern Moldova.
f) PI Project Officer, Danny, with Natalia (Local Initiative) talking with a women’s group in Pasiause, Lithuania.
Footnotes
1 Before setting up Powerful Information, Mike Flood spent more than a decade working on energy policy and recycling issues (see About).
2 The policies being proposed threatened to have serious unintended consequences on lead recycling and public health in Albania (which at the time had a very effective lead recycling operation, with Roma collecting used batteries and taking them to scrap merchants).
3 Albania is one of the world’s main producers of aromatic herbs used in the pharmaceutical and food industries. However, a large fraction of the country’s output was coming from unregulated and illegal wild harvesting. This was seriously threating the fragile mountain ecosystems and important biodiversity.
a) Typical landscape in southern Moldova.
b) Delegation of Romanian waste management specialists visiting a large landfill gas site in Bedfordshire, England.
c) Workshop in Perm (Russian Urals) which brought together grassroots NGOs and local authorities to improve the exchange of environmental information.
d) Roma in Shkoder collecting scrap; lead furness in Dures recovering lead from lead acid batteries and other sources of scrap.
e) Camelia (Prietenii Pamantului, Galati, Romania) at work with local majors at one of our workshops in southern Moldova.
f) PI Project Officer, Danny, with Natalia (Local Initiative) talking with a women’s group in Pasiause, Lithuania.
Footnotes
1 Before setting up Powerful Information, Mike Flood spent more than a decade working on energy policy and recycling issues (see About).
2 The policies being proposed threatened to have serious unintended consequences on lead recycling and public health in Albania (which at the time had a very effective lead recycling operation, with Roma collecting used batteries and taking them to scrap merchants).
3 Albania is one of the world’s main producers of aromatic herbs used in the pharmaceutical and food industries. However, a large fraction of the country’s output was coming from unregulated and illegal wild harvesting. This was seriously threating the fragile mountain ecosystems and important biodiversity.
