Making strategic environmental assessment work for biodiversity in Croatia

Strategic Environmental Assessment is a tool used in the EU for mainstreaming biodiversity and environmental issues into other sectors of socio-economic development. SEA offers a high level of environmental protection and can shape plans, programs, and strategies towards a more sustainable solution. Based on the EU Commission SEA report (2019) and interviews conducted with practitioners in national SEA processes, the possibility of shaping plans towards more sustainable solutions has rarely been fully achieved. What are the obstacles to effective SEA national implementation and how to overcome them was the focus of this paper. The research was conducted with three main groups of stakeholders: consultants, the Ministry of Economy and Sustainable Development, and environmental Civil Society Organisations. As a result, opportunities and specific intervention points were identified. The main opportunities consist of raising the level of SEA inclusiveness, educating stakeholders in the SEA process and improving the initiation timing of the SEA process. Further, opportunities were developed into specific interventions and ranked based on five criteria: Impact, Probability of success, Cultural fit, Added value, and Resource intensity. This paper suggests that stimulating the application of existing guidelines and educating the SEA committee have the highest potential impact and added value to SEA process improvement, but educating the SEA committee is a more complex task due to high cultural challenges. Improving a SEA non-technical summary and standardising the public hearing forms are interventions with a high probability of success, culturally fit, and not resource intensive but with low impact on the overall SEA process. Importantly, 10 out of 15 identified specific interventions are unique for this project, indicating this work's novelty. Finally, this paper suggests that for long-term improvement of the national SEA process, establishing the SEA Technical Working Group is highly beneficial.