provision to ensure the survival of citizens and displaced communities, or the provision
of grants for international NGOs working on rebuilding communities and on activities
designed to heal ethnic divisions. Understandably perhaps, the environment did not
feature as an issue in the immediate post-Dayton period. Project grants for environmental
assistance and a much greater emphasis on the issue generally has occurred largely in
response to the EU’s agenda and the emphasis it places on the issue, particularly with
regard to Bosnia’s possible future accession.
Though the range of environmental capacity building initiatives undertaken by donor
agencies can and often are quite varied, the main emphasis of trans-national donor
assistance projects tends to be on supporting ENGOs and the development of
environmental movement networks. This is certainly the case in BiH.
In some respects Bosnian ENGOs can broadly be described as being at a similar stage of
development as their Central East European counterparts were at the start of the 1990s.
Apart from the conservation youth organisation Gorans, which was established during
the socialist period under the auspices of the Communist Party of Yugoslavia, all the
ENGOs in BiH are new, having been established during the war, or in the period since
1995.
Organisations tend to be run by a few volunteers, usually university students, who may be
involved in several different organisations. Environmentalism has not played a particular
role in Bosnian politics and is generally regarded, by both politicians and the public, as
being of low political significance. Indeed, environmental NGOs have emerged as part of
the wider growth in NGOs during the war and the post-war periods, largely as a
consequence of the availability of donor money and civil society development projects,
rather than as a direct response to specific ecological issues.
Even in cases where an organisation has emerged in direct response to a particular local
problem, the realities of funding and dependency on foreign donors mean that the issue
agenda of the organisation quickly shifts away from the local context towards the current
issue priorities of the EU, the Regional Environmental Center (REC)
ll Foundation. This gives rise to a sense of ENGOs as being temporary; many of the
organisations listed by ICVA (International Council for Voluntary Associations), a
Bosnian-run organisation that supports and helps develop the NGO sector, in its 2001/2
directory or on the current REC database no longer operate or exist. Though according to
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Convention