Good Environmental Governance
Since 2002, the OSCE has been promoting the establishment and functioning of Aarhus Centres, which facilitate the implementation of Aarhus Convention through raising public awareness on environmental issues, facilitating access to information and to justice in environmental matters, and enhancing public participation in decision-making process.
The OSCE-founded network of Aarhus Centres is currently active in 15 countries in the OSCE area. Among other activities, the Aarhus Centres play a prominent role in enhancing green economy and resource efficiency initiatives.
The OSCE also provides support for the implementation of other multilateral environmental agreements, as the Water Convention on the protection and use of transboundary watercourses and international lakes and the Espoo Convention on environmental impact assessment in a transboundary context. In particular, the OSCE provides support on legislative reform to align the existing systems with the Espoo Convention and to introduce provisions relating to the Protocol on Strategic Environmental Assessment.
Mandate
Building up good environmental governance requires close co-operation between international, regional and national bodies. Driven by this cognizance, the OSCE’s activities are implemented in co-ordination with several key stakeholders like the other partners of the Environment and Security (ENVSEC) Initiative (UNEP, UNDP, UNECE), international organizations, governmental authorities, civil society, NGO, the business community and others.
Good Environmental Governance has been part of the OSCE political commitments starting from the 1975 Helsinki Final Act. Several other key documents explicitly refers to good governance in environmental matters, like the 1992 Helsinki Document, the 2003 OSCE Strategy Document for the Economic and Environmental Dimension, the 2007 Madrid Declaration on Environment and Security, the 2013 Kyiv Ministerial Council Decision on Improving the Environmental Footprint of Energy-Related Activities in the OSCE Region, and the 2014 Basel Ministerial Council Decision on Enhancing Disaster Risk Reduction.