The Twinning Programme

This project belongs to the Twinning Programme of the European Commission, created in 1998, which consituted the axis of the projects of institutional reform and administrative modernisation of the candidate countries to the access to the EU, representing the 30% of the PHARE Funds.

Those funds constituted the main financial instruments of European pre-accession help to the countries of Central and Eastern Europe, with an amount allocated of 1.500 million euros per year during the period 2000 – 2006. In the current programming period 2007 – 2013 the PHARE funds, together with the rest of pre-accession support structures of the previous period, have been integrated into a single financial instrument, the Instrument for Pre-Accession Assistance (IPA), to whom the Twinning Programme belongs.

Environmental Twinnings in Romania

The action scope of the project corresponds to the Region 1 – North – East of Romania. It belongs to a set of 8 environmental Twinning projects developed in parallel, each one located in one of the 8 regions which constitute the country, plus the Twinning assessing the National Environmental Protection Agency (NEPA) of Bucarest, and which coordinates the rest of projects. All of them assist the corresponding Regional and Local Environmental Protection Agencies (REPA and LEPA) belonging to their regions, and the National Environmental Guard (NEG) and NEPA, assessing them through the participation of experts from the other Member States involved in the projects, to help them to face the challenge posed by the transposition of the European environmental acquis and the environmental standards of the EU.

The 9 Twinning projects, lasting 18 months, are the Phase II of another Phase I projects which finalised in november 2007. In the following a table with the Phase II projects is presented:

The 9 projects are divided into a series of areas shared by all of them, and each of the Twinnings puts special emphasis into one of these areas, as indicated in the table.

Basics of this Twinning

The main activity of this Twinning project, which involves experts from Spain, The Netherlands and Romania, is the assessment on domestic waste management, having as a goal that the North-East Region becomes a reference model for the rest of regions of Romania in this subject. All the aspects will be treated: elaboration and monitoring of integrated plans for urban waste management, analysis of the technical and economical feasability of different management models, environmental awareness and communication campaigns, use of EU Funds to develop projects, implementation of programs for reducing, reusing and recycling, composting, etc.

The execution of this activity will amount to approximately a 40% of the share of work of the project. The other 60% of assessment is distributed among all the fields of competence and deficitary aspects of REPA, LEPAs, NEG and NEPA, beneficiaries of the project: institutional capacity development, environmental planning, integrated prevention and pollution control (IPPC), air quality and climate change, nature protection and biodiversity conservation, chemicals, soil/subsoil protection and remediation, horizontal legislation and management of EU funds.

This last area plays a special role, due to the vast spanish experience in the management of Structural and Cohesion Funds, and the great amount of community funds that, from now on, will receive Romania: The Sectorial Operational Programme for Environment and environmental infrastructures 2007 – 2013 alone has close to 5.600 million euros assigned from the European Fund for Regional Development (EFRD) and the Cohesion Fund.

Given the diversity of topics which will be treated, a team of coordinators, one for each area, has been established, where each one will coordinate a team of experts coming from national, regional and local administrations.

The implementation of the activities will be in the form of numerous seminars and workshops of several days each, with the participation of one or several spanish or dutch experts. These seminars are aimed at romanian civil servants from the beneficiary institution, whose goal is to fulfill a certain set of benchmarks stated in the Twinning Contract.

Key figures

The key figures of the Twinning are:

-          The spanish Project Leader of the project, José Álvarez, Executive President of SOGAMA,

-          The romanian Project Leader, Iulian Movila, Executive Director of the Regional Environmental Protection Agency (REPA) of Region 1 – North-East,

-          The dutch Coordinator, Herman Huisman, Senior Advisor in SenterNovem

Who are the ultimate responsibles of the project, and count with the presence of a Resident Twinning Advisor (RTA), César Seoánez, with office at REPA Bacau, who together with his Counterpart, Mihaela Ambarus, coordinates all the activities of the project in Romania, serving as link between the administrations of the different countries involved. The RTA counts for his task with the key help of a team formed by an assistant, Radu Rotaru, and two translator-interpreters, Etelka Tamas and Cristina Dinu.

We should as well note the existence of a spanish Body, the International and Ibero-American Foundation of Public Administration and Policies (FIIAPP), codirected by the Ministries  of Foreign Affairs and Cooperation and Public Administrations, specialized in the management of cooperation projects, whose colaboration constitutes an essential logistic support for the execution of this ambitious project.

Stages of the project

Presentation of proposals stage and negotiation of the Contract – Work Plan (dic 2006 – feb 2008)

The call for proposals of the European Commission for the execution of the Phase II Twinning Projects took place in december 2006, being the defense of proposals of the diverse candidates held in front of the EC and romanian authorities in march 2007, in Bucharest.

Spain presented its proposal for the Phase II Twinning Project of Region North-East through the Galician Environmental Society (SOGAMA ,  description in press), leading a Spanish-Dutch consortium in which The Netherlands was represented by the Waste Management Department of SenterNovem, the Dutch agency promoting sustainable development and innovation. It was strongly supported by the Spanish Authorities, specially by the Minister of Environment and the Galician Regional Minister of Environment and Sustainable Development, as well as by the Spanish and Dutch Ambassadors in Bucharest, what contributed to the selection of this proposal, who competed with the one of the consortium formed by Belgium, Greece and Italy, countries in charge of the execution of the Phase I Twinning Project.

After the communication of the selection of the proposal by the Romanian authorities the Spanish-Dutch consortium leaded by SOGAMA started the process of elaboration of the Twinning Contract (link a la página con los documentos del Convenio), where the activities to develop and the benchmarks to be obtained during the execution of the project are specified. The process culminated the 27^th of February 2008 with the signature by all parts (European Commission, Spain and Holland, and Romania) of the final text, giving in this way approval for the start of the execution stage.

Execution stage (mar 2008 – ago 2009)

After the signature the Resident Twinning Advisor proceeded to install in Bacau and to make the necessary arrangements to start the execution of activities. The “official” start was set by the so-called Kick-off Meeting, the 31^st of March 2008.

Shortly after began the first part of the execution stage of the project, lasting for 2 months and a half, during which for each of the 10 areas covered by the project a visit of 2 days of the corresponding coordinator took place, with the aim to hold several meetings with romanian experts from the administrations and departments with responsibilities in that area, to i) establish a first contact and mutual knowledge (from the Spanish or Dutch team, and from the Romanian beneficiaries and their current situation, competences, problems and subjects of interest) and ii) to elaborate a planning where the detailed contents of the rest of the seminars and workshops of the corresponding area were defined.

That planning period lasted until the middle of June 2008, moment when the implementation of the seminars planned for all the areas started. This implementation period will last until the antepenultimate month of the Twinning, when the evaluation period of the program executed and the elaboration of further proposals for future improvement will take place.