Environmental Enforcement

Report Title: Progress Monitoring Manual
Source: Progress Monitoring on Approximation in the Candidate Countries of Central and Eastern Europe
Author: European Commission’s Directorate-General for Environmental Protection
Web Link: European Union
Date of report review: October 13, 2001

Report notes:

• EU Environmental Reporting Requirements
  Member states of the EU are under the obligation to report via the Reporting Directive system. The system covers 30 environmental Directives, mainly dealing with air and water quality, and waste management. The Reporting Directive system involves a series of questionnaires that are mandatory for member states to use when reporting at stipulated intervals. (The intervals are unknown at this time.) Candidate countries are encourage to design a system for monitoring approximation and implementation that could be easily adapted to meet the Reporting Directive requirements.

• Progress Monitoring of Approximation
  Two types of information are needed to monitor approximation progress.
  • objective assessments of current status of transposition and of implementation
  • information on the changes in that status over time
    
    
• The objective assessment must be a provision-by-provision assessment of the correspondence between the national law and each EU act with the ministry of environment. The same should be done for the status of implementation. The Progress Monitoring of Approximation project selected 24 directives for special attention; these are considered the most important framework laws of approximately 70 major EU environmental directives.

• Progress Monitoring on Transposition
  The Table of Concordance is used by many member states to demonstrate to the Commission that transposition of the provisions of EU directives has been completed, and is recommended for candidate countries to use in reporting progress on transposition. The tables should be revised approximately every six months. The table employs a value system (on a scale of 0-5) to assess the stages of a country’s legislative procedure.
• Progress Monitoring of Implementation
  The process of implementation of EU laws are grouped in 4 stages:
  • situation assessment - Determine which practices are covered by the EU act and the status of compliance with the EU requirements. This information is collected and used to set priorities for implementation in the action planning stage.
  • action planning – Development of mechanisms and programs of action to address priorities identified in stage 1, factors such as available financial and human resources are taken into consideration.
  • action taking – Carrying out the plans, such as building the necessary infrastructure, instituting administrative systems, etc.
  • evaluation – self-explanatory.
    

Suggested initiatives:

• The matrix for progress monitoring, the Reporting Directives, and the Tables of Concordance are three excellent tools to use in revising the INECE country progress report format. I am waiting to get case samples of accession candidate countries progress reports.