UNDP Albania

Applying systems thinking to environmental permitting in Albania

2019 -

Partners
UNDP Albania
Ministry of Tourism and Environment

Albania’s future prosperity and resilience depends on a systemic shift in how it looks after and regenerates its natural assets. Environmental Impact Assessment, environmental permits and compliance monitoring are central to Albania’s environmental governance. The system currently creates a series of visible failures - but these can only be understood by looking at a series of wider drivers. Systemic change is needed as the current failures have deep systemic impacts on Albania’s ability to thrive in the future.

This is increasingly urgent in our age of unprecedented change, where droughts stop us from being able to calculate future cash flows and existing business models and business-as-usual processes no longer make sense. As climate change accelerates the multiple security threats (energy, food etc.) we urgently need to find new processes of driving change.

We recognise four particular opportunity areas (making the invisible visible, automating bureaucracy, reframing the debate, building capacity of change-makers) for driving change in this system. If they are addressed in tandem, this will create multiple benefits across Albania’s natural assets, health outcomes, economy and society at large.