The Baltic Environmental Forum (BEF) was founded in 1995 by the Baltic Ministries of Environment, Germany and the European Commission as a technical assistance project aiming at strengthening the co-operation among the Baltic environmental authorities.
In order to keep the network active the BEF team has founded in 2003 new NGOs in Latvia, Estonia, Lithuania and Germany. Since 2004 the BEF Group cooperates with the Centre of Transboundary Cooperation St. Petersburg, who became formally a member in the BEF Group in 2005. The organizations are independent in legal and fiscal terms, but they form a network as so-called “BEF Group” and have common goals and joint activities. The network character is laid down in an agreement on cooperation between all parties. According to this agreement BEF Latvia functioned as headquarter of the network and the other organizations are its members until spring 2010. From spring 2010, BEF Germany took over the role of the headquarter.
The five independent NGOs develop projects together mainly in the Baltic Sea region, which is the target region of the operations of the organizations. Each of the NGOs also acts on national level in its country, however multi-country projects are predominating.
The BEF NGOs are operating project based and depend on grants and contracts. In 2006 the network received first time the EU support for environmental NGOs acting in more than three countries – a kind of small core funding.
The goals of the BEF Group are to act in various fields of environmental policy with regard to capacity building, experience transfer and facilitation of different stakeholders in the Baltic Sea region. Additionally it is envisaged to extend the scope of activities to other countries in Eastern Europe - to make use of their location and facilitate cooperation with the neighbouring countries Russia, Belarus and Ukraine.
What They Do
Characteristics of BEF projects are high quality seminars and training courses for different stakeholders. Their “opinion” on problems with environmental policy implementation, enforcement weaknesses and legislation gaps (not only in Baltic States) is derived from their learning that communication and dialogue among the stakeholders is missing and this is the niche they were and are acting in.
The BEF group does not understand itself as environmental pressure group, but as facilitators and supporters to dialogue, policy implementation and awareness raising. Projects implemented by BEF are envisaged to serve environmental administration, industry as well as society represented by NGOs. They participate in a few NGO forums and national working groups as a NGO party.
Since being an NGO, the BEF has applied and received mostly grants dealing with implementation of EU Environmental legislation at different stakeholder level. They are still providing training and workshop programmes in combination with expert analyses to state authorities, local authorities and industry to raise their capacity in various environmental policy fields. Furthermore, they investigate on legislation, implementation and enforcement gaps in the three Baltic States and try to contribute to its improvement.
Recently, BEF has also widened actions towards public awareness raising actions on single environmental issues, such as river basin planning, Natura 2000, chemicals in products or eco-labelling. They are newly addressing the general public and other NGOs as multipliers for raising public awareness on these environmental policy fields as well.
Thematic Areas
