COVER STORY
Summer 2016 / Issue 50
EU Supports Environmental
Inspection Improvement Efforts
S
ince January 2015, an EU-funded project has
been working with the Macedonian State Environmental Inspectorate (SEI), as well as with
authorised environmental inspectors from
municipalities, to improve their effectiveness
and align with EU best practices1. The request to the EU
for support by the SEI through the Ministry of Environment
and Physical Planning (MoEPP) began in 2011 in response
to the persistent gap between new EU environmental
requirements transposed into national legislation, and the
actual level of implementation by industry and other relevant stakeholders. This gap had been – and remains –
cause for concern both for the Macedonian environmental
authorities as well as for the European Commission, which
emphasized in the country’s last annual progress reports
the need to close such gap between theory and practice.
To meet the need, 3 EU co-financed actions were
designed to: support environmental inspection at central
and local levels; provide technical assistance to 9 pilot
municipalities and MoEPP in other duties related to implementation of environmental legislation at the local level; and
provide various kinds of equipment and software to improve
the working conditions of environmental inspectors in the
country, including a set of vehicles, measuring equipment,
office IT equipment, and a document and process management software. Implementation took place from 2015-16.
The “Twinning” project mainly benefitted SEI and the EU
counterparts were the Spanish Galician Regional Ministry
of Environment and Spatial Planning and The International
and Ibero-American Foundation for Administration and Public Policies (FIIAPP) and the Netherlands’ Ministry of Infrastructure and Environment. This project