The Access Initiative (TAI)—a global coalition of public interest groups are working together to promote access to information, public participation, and justice in environmental decisionmaking. TAI is designed to accelerate implementation of Principle 10 of the Rio Declaration (see Partnership for Principle 10) by developing common standards and a tool for assessing government performance in policy and practice. The assessment tool, composed of more than 100 indicators, enables national-level civil society to identify constraints to Principle 10 implementation by reviewing legal and regulatory frameworks and examining specific cases.
In 2004, the global network expanded to include NGO coalitions in over 15 new countries. New TAI assessments were initiated in Argentina, Bolivia, Bulgaria, Costa Rica, Ecuador, El Salvador, Estonia, Kazakhstan, Kenya, Latvia, Lithuania, Peru, Poland, Portugal, Tanzania, and Ukraine. Second TAI assessments (building on the pilot assessments conducted in 2002) were conducted in Chile, Hungary, Mexico, and Uganda. The TAI network now includes coalitions in 25 countries.
The Chilean and Mexican TAI national coalitions worked together to obtain over £450,000 from the British Government to support TAI and PP10 activities in Latin America. This funding has enabled five new countries in Latin America to join TAI and begin new national assessments.
Results of the original nine TAI pilot assessments conducted in 2002 illustrated the significant challenges governments face in providing adequate access to justice in environmental decision-making. In 2004, WRI worked closely with an international working group of partners and experts to develop new access-to-justice indicators. Feedback from the TAI coalitions in some 15 countries performing pilot tests of these indicators will be incorporated into the next version of the TAI methodology, expected to be released in late 2005.
TAI is also developing new governance indicators for the electricity and water sectors. In 2004, TAI collaborated with WRI’s International Financial Flows and the Environment (IFFE) project and civil society organizations in India, Indonesia, Thailand, and the Philippines to develop indicators of “good governance” in the electricity sector. These results have served as the basis for a new set of indicators loosely based on the TAI methodology, but going into significantly more detail relevant to the sector—for example, in terms of the transparency of independent regulators. These indicators will be pilot-tested in at least four countries in 2005, and WRI expects to release a final version in early 2006. Developing indicators of good governance in the water sector is the next priority, based on the significant interest TAI has encountered among partners and the donor community.
