Commitment: Activation of an electronic portal for meeting the Environmental Assessment Code requirements
Commitment Description: Timely access to environmental information and effective public participation at every stage of the decision-making process is a significant challenge for the country.

The present commitment continues the Commitment N16 of the OGP Georgia Action Plan for 2016- 2017 (Adoption of the Environmental Assessment Code), within the scope of which the Ministry of Environmental Protection and Agriculture of Georgia developed the Environmental Assessment Code and fully implemented the commitment.

The Parliament of Georgia adopted the Code on 1 June 2017, which is in full compliance with both the EU guidelines on environmental impact assessment and strategic environmental assessment and the Convention (Aarhus Convention) on access to environmental information, public participation in environmental decision-making, and access to Justice.

To ensure public participation in the decision-making process, the Ministry enables publishing all documents provided by the legislation on the Ministry's official web page. However, this information is not published systematically and easily accessible.

It is the above problem that the commitment of LEPL Environmental Information and Education Center is designed to solve within the scope of the OGP Georgia Action Plan for 2018-2019 through activation of an electronic portal for meeting the requirements of the Environmental Assessment Code.

Within the commitment, efforts are made to develop an electronic system that effectively provides timely and easy access to information and public engagement at every stage of the decision-making process. An electronic system will enable the stakeholders to get perfectly familiar in a systematized manner and through a simple interface with the Environmental Assessment Code's procedures. In addition, the platform will enable public availability of information on infrastructure projects and their environmental assessment. It will encourage citizens' and other stakeholders' engagement in the decision-making process required to implement similar projects. Timeline: Start date - October 2018, End date - September 2019
OGP Thematic Areas: Transparency, Accountability, Innovation and Technology, Engagement
Reporting Period: 2019, Annual
Lead Agency: LEPL - Environmental Information and Education Center (EIEC)
Work on the development of an electronic environmental assessment system started at the end of 2018. At an initial stage, the analysis of business processes was conducted in cooperation with the financial analytical service of the Ministry of Finance, which set as a priority not only the creation of a public portal but also the development of an internal system. The analysis demonstrated 24 that this would enable the public to have access to environmental information and ensure their participation in the decision-making processes, and also an effective and stable work of the public portal to the maximum extent possible. The internal system is the central core of the public portal forming a single platform where different agencies are able to work in a single system. This also contributes to structuring and synchronizing of different pieces of information and saving time and human resources, making the process more effective. Another important thing is that it will be possible to automatically upload the documents from the internal system to the public portal.

In the reporting period a plan was prepared, and an internal system was developed. Besides, training on system usage was conducted for its potential users – the employees responsible for managing and administering the Ministry of Environmental Protection and Agriculture portal.

At the end of 2019, after setting up the internal system was finalized, work continued on the public part of the portal. At the next stage, with active involvement and participation of public sector representatives, information uploaded on the portal was identified, the structural part of the portal was developed, and the functional requirements, particularly menu items, grids, forms and corresponding text values were defined in details.

According to the Secretariat’s assessment, the commitment is mostly implemented within the Action Plan’s timeline. The analysis of business processes was conducted, though, only the portal structure's main part was developed according to the identified needs. Also, the decisions made prior to portal activation were not fully uploaded.