About project

The whole project was implemented and this webpage was prepared as part of the project "From local to global heroes - NGO networking and project incubation in New Member States" implemented by Environmental Law Service. The project is financed by European Commission through program „Support of civil society in the Member States which acceded to the EU on 1st May 2004“. The sole responsibility for the project outputs lies with Environmental Law Service, the Commission is not responsible for any use of the opinions or information contained here.

The Watchdog project addresses a serious problem facing NGOs in New Members States – insufficient knowledge of similar organisations and possibilities for cooperation in other Member states. Often, national level NGOs are 'local heroes', having a high level of expertise in their chosen field, but for whatever reason insufficient capacity and/or awareness of the existence of/or possibilities for similar work in other Member States and the possibility of Cooperation at the EU level. This project lays the necessary base work to create an NGO service centre 'office' in the CEE region which will have the following two purposes: 1) to provide support for other NGOs in the region in the fields of cooperation, networking, fund raising, and similar issues. 2) to explore the possibilities for those NGOs of work at the EU level. Given the huge possibilities for work in this area, the office will initially (in the first years of its functioning) concentrate on certain specific areas, namely public interest law, transparency, governance and anti-corruption issues. The aim of this project is to map out, by networking the needs for such a 'project incubator' that will boost the long term presence and stability of NGOs in the region.

NGOs typically face constraints in staff, capacity and financing. One result of this however is inability to explore possibilities for work outside their sphere of activities which could bring these NGOs strategic benefits. Substantial new funding opportunities exist in EU 10 States as a result of EU membership, the pre- requisites to access that financing (among which partnership, networking and EU added benefit play key roles) may be daunting; this in turn is detrimental to the long term financial sustainability of these organisations. Exploring the possibilities for cooperation (at any level) requires a certain capacity which, for a small or medium sized NGO, may be a luxury. The result is that work may be done in parallel, best practises not recognised, and opportunities to address these problems may go unnoticed.

At the same time, there is a clear need for the work that national level NGOs produce to be disseminated to decision makers. While Commission policy recognizes NGOs as stakeholders, National-level NGOs need channels to promote their viewpoints and point out the problems which they face. Such channels may take several forms, from simply finding an 'interested ear' in Brussels to establishing a new NGO or NGO association to deal systematically with the problem at the EU level.