Association Green Alternative was registered on 31 July, 2000. Currently their organization employs ten staff person and has 12 active members. Green Alternative was formed from the group of leading campaigners of Friends of the Earth – Georgia. Accordingly, activities carried out by their organization are continuation of previous work.
Mission Statement
The mission of Green Alternative is to protect the environment, biological and cultural heritage of Georgia through promoting economically sound and socially acceptable alternatives, establishing the principles of environmental and social justice and upholding public access to information and decision-making processes.
Their Work
They organize their work around six thematic and four cross-cutting areas. Thematic priority areas include: energy – extractive industry – climate change; transport sector and environment; privatization and environment; biodiversity conservation; waste management; water management. Cross-cutting priority areas include: environmental governance; public access to information, decision-making and justice; instruments for environmental management and sustainable development; monitoring of the lending of the international financial institutions and international financial flow in Georgia. Another increasingly important area of their work, where Green Alternative was a front runner among Georgian NGOs, is the European Neighbourhood Policy and EU-Georgia Action Plan.
Green Alternative’s work consists of project-focused and policy campaigns. They are targeting large-scale development projects with detrimental environmental and/or social impacts. With varying degrees of success, in all cases, Green Alternative’s involvement has brought changes to particular projects and policies, as well as to the degree and ways in which civil society and affected communities were involved in decisionmaking processes. In each project or policy campaign Green Alternative combines the campaign work with capacity building of the local groups and facilitates their direct involvement in the campaigns. Green Alternative cooperates with non-governmental organizations both inside and outside Georgia.
Green Alternative’s current advocacy campaigns among them include campaign on hydropower development projects that pose significant threat to environment and local communities, campaign on transportation development projects, campaign on transparency of privatization processes, as well as policy-level campaign targeted at newly introduced amendments to environmental legislation granting project developers undue exemption from environmental liability.
