Capacity building in project development on environment and energy in Azerbaijan

On behalf of the European Neighborhood Policy (ENP) Initiative, the European Commission introduced the Twinning-Instrument for the countries of the Southern Caucasus in 2007. This initiative developed from Azerbaijan’s adoption of the ENP Action Plan in 2006, which set the environmental sector and the priority action areas for the coming years in action.

At this time though, the Southern Caucasus’ states were not yet in a position to formulate appropriate twinning projects in the environmental field. For this reason, the Federal Ministry for the Environment, Nature Conservation and Nuclear Safety (BMU) commissioned adelphi to prepare and implement capacity building workshops. This enabled the staff of the Azerbaijani Ministry of Environment to formulate and apply for projects in the environmental field independently.

The project included a trip to Baku, as well as a four-day workshop with the Azerbaijani Ministry of Environment representatives. From these meetings, the objectives and operations of the Twinning-Instrument were introduced and formulated for selected areas of the environmental and resource protection. Hereafter, the project outlines were used as a basis to further reform the Twinning projects, which were to be negotiated between the European Commission and the Azerbaijani Ministry of Environment.