Environmental Protection

USAID/ISC’s Civil Society Advocacy Initiative (CSAI) has supported environmental activities in Serbia, including the “Green List of Serbia,” a coalition comprised of local and regional civil society organizations (CSOs) to facilitate cooperation around environmental issues. As a result of increased communication, information exchange, and capacity building by one of ISC’s main implementing partners– Balkans Community Initiatives Fund (BCIF)–12 local CSOs decided to mount a joint advocacy initiative to address the most common problem shared by a majority of rural communities: illegal waste dumps.

This campaign, entitled “Eco Caravan,” targeted 1 million people in towns and communities across Serbia including Valjevo, Gornji Milanovac, Trstenik, Krusevac, Raska, Knjazevac, Aleksinac, Nis, Vranje, Zagubica, and Vucje from April to July 2009. The joint action raised awareness of environmental issues by attracting media attention, targeting relevant government institutions and large numbers of citizens to participate in various clean-ups and other related activities. Activities included a bike tour across Serbia, planting trees as a symbolic action, and organizing a photo competition for pictures of the worse dumps in Serbia.

Green List was complimented by a large advocacy campaign launched by EXIT, which attracts more than 200,000 mostly young people to its annual music festival. This year EXIT chose to “go green” and dedicate its entire festival to environmental issues, a significant boost in raising awareness of environmental issues at the national level. EXIT adopted eco-friendly technology such as solar power for the EXIT campgrounds, powered fesitval stages with bio-diesel fuel, and enacted other environmental and technological advances. With CSAI support EXIT featured a large-scale advocacy campaign about environmental issues. In addition, EXIT provided significant space at the festival for Green List activities, and the amount of publicity related to the festival itself greatly raised the visibility of CSAI-supported environmental initiatives such as Green List.

As a part of its project, CSAI supported a B92 environmental awareness raising campaign to increase visibility of local environmental initiatives designed to step up efforts to clean remote areas that contain indigenous ecosystems and bring into public focus some of the most burning ecological issues: waste disposal, illegal dumps, environmental depletion, renewable sources of energy, and recycling.

On a more general level, the project stressed the need to introduce qualitatively different lifestyles in Serbia and inaugurated new practices of addressing environmental issues in Serbia. To this end, CSAI supported filming, production and broadcasting of approximately 20 five minute documentary programs about the challenges facing ordinary people (such as environmental pollution, degradation and depletion or resources in their everyday lives), and how those people decided to work together through volunteer action to directly resolve such problems and make public officials fully aware of the full scope of the environmental crisis in Serbia.