• To provide ongoing secretariat support to the Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) Environmental Funds Network, such as assistance in daily communication and networking, establishing contacts, information dissemination and liaison between the Funds Network and relevant stakeholders in the targeted region; and
• To assist in implementing the accession-related tasks of the Work Programme of the CEE Environmental Funds Network (listed below under Sub-tasks b and c).

Outputs

• (re-created) CEE Environmental Funds Network
• Collection of relevant documents

Background

At the 1998 Aarhus "Environment for Europe" Conference of the Ministers of the Environment, the Regional Environmental Center (REC) received the mandate to take a lead in supporting the development and implementation of the accession-related investment component of the Work Programme of the EAP Task Force. Based on this mandate, the CEE Environmental Funds Network Secretariat has been moved during 1999 from OECD to the REC.

The general objective of the Secretariat is to support the implementation of the CEE Environmental Funds Network Work Programme. Priorities for this programme for the period 2000-2001 were developed based on the needs identified by participants of the network at the September 1999 conference in Bled, Slovenia. The specific objectives of the secretariat within the scope of this project are listed above.

The secretariat is also in an excellent position to assure a thorough co-ordination between this project and the activities of the CEE Environmental Funds Network Work Programme to be conducted outside of the scope of this project. In particular, the secretariat will maximise the use of the outcomes resulting from this project by the knowledge and know-how transfer between the ten candidate and the other European countries (i.e. SEE countries) participating in the Funds Network. The secretariat will also disseminate the information about the Funds Network's activities of a country-specific character (individual Fund's performance reviews, individual guidelines, etc., to be conducted outside the scope of this project).