Information, Participation, Justice: The Keys to Sustainable Development (Access to Environmental Justice)

Information, Participation, Justice: The Keys to Sustainable Development (Access to Environmental Justice)

Objectives

To systematically assess national level governance of access to information, participation and justice in development decisions that affect the environment.

Geographical spread    

Assessments conducted by research teams in nine pilot countries: Chile, Hungary, India, Indonesia, Mexico, South Africa, Thailand, Uganda and the United States.

Key areas/components

• Developing an understanding of the three access principles: Access to Information, to Participation and to Justice.
• Analyzing the findings from national assessments of public participation systems conducted by coalitions of NGOs in the nine countries.
• The study was designed in four major parts in order to capture:
• The legal framework in place. The practices in access to different types of information and participation in diverse decision making processes, and the general conditions for informed participation such as media attention to environmental issues.
  •  Capacity building efforts.
  •  Conditions for NGOs.

Key outputs

• Identification of common trends in the development of legal frameworks.
• Findings based on assessment of public participation practices of selected case studies in the pilot countries.
• Summary of strengths and weaknesses in the national level implementation of the three principles.
• A systematic framework designed to synthesize lessons learned from the study so as to collate a comprehensive portrait of access conditions in the pilot countries.
• Assessment and ranking of international institutions on their performance at implementing the access principles.

Year/period    

May 2002

Client 

World Resources Institute, USA