CASE Co-ordination Meeting

The CASE (Civic Action for Security and Environment) Initiative fosters co-operation between civil society organizations and their governments in addressing environment and security challenges through supporting civil society projects with small grants.

The CASE Co-ordination Meeting brought together CASE practitioners from Armenia, Azerbaijan and Tajikistan including representatives of government, CASE grantee NGOs, UNDP and OSCE field missions. Several OSCE delegations were invited as observers: Armenia, Austria, Azerbaijan, Finland, Germany, Italy, Kazakhstan, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Norway, Switzerland, Tajikistan and the United States participated in the meeting.

The purpose of the meeting was to facilitate the exchange of experiences and lessons learned in implementing the CASE Programme in Armenia, Azerbaijan, and Tajikistan and to plan for the next phase of implementation.

During extensive discussions, participants emphasized the success of CASE in promoting good environmental governance principles and environmental security.

The strengths of the CASE programme, including its decentralized and transparent decision-making structure, its focus on NGONGO
non-governmental organization capacity-building and its facilitation of partnerships between government and civil society were also highlighted. In addition, a number of challenges requiring increased attention in the next phases of CASE implementation were identified. These include capacity building programmes for NGOs, strengthened monitoring and evaluation, linkages of CASE with ENVSEC projects and resource mobilization.