engleski

The public and interested public in environmental practices

The 21st century has seen great progress in all areas of scientific knowledge, in particular climate change and the right to participation and informing the public in making environmentally-friendly decisions. Today the right to a healthy environment is a fundamental human right. European rules provide for early public participation in environmental impact assessment procedures. The goal is early involvement, and continuous public participation in the process, creating the preconditions that allow the public to significantly affect the outcome of environmental impact assessments. This is regulated with various regulations, and their amendments. Following the adoption of the Aarhus Convention, in 2003 the EU adopted the Directive on Public Participation in the Process of Preparing Plans and Programmes Relating to the Environment. This paper presents the results of empirical research on information and opinion of interested public in the Republic of Croatia according to the differences between the interested public and the public in the procedures on the assessment of environmental impact studies. Qualitative research on the target sample was conducted using in-depth interviews and participatory observation. The grounded theory method was used in the empirical material analysis, and the quantification of qualitatively processed encrypted material was calculated using Statistica 11.00. Most respondents believe that there is a difference between the interested public and the public and explain that the interested public includes the local community and stakeholders directly and immediately interested in a specific project, while the public includes stakeholders who do not belong to the community, and do not have direct interest. Slightly less than half of the respondents think that there is no difference between the public and the interested public due to the fact that this is only legally regulated, insignificant in the environmental process, and only means meeting the legal form and alignment with the EU regulations.

The interested public and the public ; the Aarhus Convention ; environmental protection

nije evidentirano