Focusing on Urban Wastewater Management in Central and Eastern European Countries, CIFAL Plock hosted its final training of 2010 from November 30-December 2, CIFAL Plock in Poland. The training was paired with a one day conference on November 30th that explored current trends in regional Urban Wastewater Management and the areas of Implementation of European Union Directives and Projects, and Public Private Partnerships (PPPs) to develop and scale-up wastewater management across the region’s municipalities.
From 1 to 2 December 2010, over thirty participants from national ministries, municipalities, academia and private institutions related to wastewater services delivery presented on national strengths, challenges and needs to upgrade services delivery. With representatives CEE countries such as Lithuania, Romania, Poland, Croatia, Albania and many others, the workshop was able to form a shared picture of the realities municipalities are facing in wastewater services delivery. Two shared bottlenecks emerged a) financing for sustainability is a key issue for many municipalities, which are currently dependent on external sources such as EU, or already squeezed local tax bases b) difficulties in developing multi-stakeholder or participatory approaches and community awareness due to a legacy of more prescriptive approaches in planning and municipal operations.
Regional trends also emerged such as low usage of Public-Private Partnerships and scepticism in engagement with the private sector as the way forward, despite the need for more self-sustainable financing mechanisms for wastewater treatment and other services. In many countries though, the PPP model is moving ahead as a successful model in countries such as Poland, the one CEE country in the region that did not undergo economic contractions with growth of 1.7% of GDP in 2009. Participants noted that one key need in financing wastewater systems is rooted in sustainability, but the PPP model is itself challenging due to the gap in mutual understanding between public and private sectors, “slowly there are important changes but still there is this problem of trust between public and private and both have to understand the interests of each side.”
Despite the region's shift from transition to emerging economies during this period of global recession and growing austerity measures, CEE nations are tackling municipal economic deficits in their own ways, while still forging ahead with integrating EU Directives and very successful implementations of EU Pre-Accession Funds to develop their Wastewater and water services overall. Croatian participants presented the cases of Karlovac and the development of the city’s first Wastewater treatment facilities thanks to EUPre-Accession funds and multi-stakeholder partnerships. Romanian representatives from Satu Mare Municipality and Louis Berger, ltd. presented cases of successful policy reform projects, PPP development and services improvement thanks to mixed funding and innovative planning approaches. Other shared realities among the region’s municipalities at the workshop included a recent or slowly emerging trend of decentralisation of power to municipalities, growing challenges of urbanization, and persistent services delivery gaps between urban and rural populations in wastewater infrastructure and services.
Participants were successfully able to consolidate and share strengths and roadmaps of how institutions can better address challenges in building community awareness, monitoring and evaluating the quality of wasteater treatmet, and potential new business models and policy models to reach EU Directives and standards. In 2011, CIFAL Plock will focus its training agenda on not only exchanging and consolidating knowledge around infrastructure and services delivery, but also on linking public and private business solutions and offers for local institutions participating in trainings from across the region.
The event was held under the patronage of: Veolia Environnement, the Municipality of Plock, the Ministry of Infrastructure of Poland, and Polish Waterworks, and with the support of: SWITCH, PriceWaterhouseCoopers, and Polytechnika Warszawska.
For more information on UNITAR Local Development training events please see www.UNITAR.org/event and for more information on CIFAL Plock please see: www.CIFALPlock.eu