Romania Toward a Low Carbon and Climate Resilient Economy | Institutional Capacity Building

This report is about Romania's committment to the development of a low carbon and green growth path, making green growth and action on climate change a national priority. The Government of Romania is undoubtedly committed to fulfilling the requirements of the UN and EU for combating climate change. However, a serious impediment to effective Climate Change (CC )action is the fact that CC is a cross-sectoral policy implemented by the Ministry of Environment, Waters and Forests (MEWF) but MEWF only has authority over a fraction of the relevant issues. It is encouraging that the Government of Romania both acknowledges the need for improving the cross-sectoral integration of CC policies and actions, and views this as part of its overall effort to address its dysfunctional horizontal policy-making processes and improve its public administration management. Co-ordination and synergy with all existing national efforts to improve administrative capacity will be essential for efficient implementation of the Low Carbon Green Growth Program (LCGGP) in Romania. However, CC expertise still remains extremely limited at the operational level and this impacts all aspects and levels of CC policymaking and the capacity for future planning. The followinga are the recommendations made; (i) the current situation and areas for improvement in the capacity of implementing National Climate Change Strategy have been analysed and have led to a number of clear recommendations for institutional capacity building; (ii) in order for CC policy to be effective in Romania it must be treated as both a national priority and a cross-sectorial responsibility. National authorities must claim ownership of the CC issue; and (iii) a more inclusive and informed policy-making process is needed, and this can only occur when more of the stakeholders are involved and made aware of the extensive CC implications for their individual sectors; (iv) A key recommendation is therefore the creation of a Climate Partners Network (CPN) constructed on the basis of a public-private partnership; (v) Entrenched practices and attitudes need to be changed. CC must have higher visibility and remain consistently on the public agenda, instead of emerging only briefly after a disaster, and it is recommended that the nexus of the coordination and implementation of CC policy should be a reformed National Commission for Climate Change (NCCC); (vi) all recommended actions will rely on increasing the public’s level of awareness, engagement, and participation; (vii) In the medium-long term, strategy implementation will need to be accompanied by changes to the educational system; and (vii) monitoring and evaluation processes will need to provide the fodder for policy adjustments based on scientific research, national priorities and market needs. Finally, in order to create effective capacity building measures, CC will need to be treated as national priority, comprehensively integrated into all levels of policymaking and budgets planning.