Environmental Engineering Reference
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participation in decision making throughout the transition period, albeit
with a lot of turnover in groups (Cellarius and Staddon 2002).
The NGO community has engaged local and other actors in these
gold-mining cases in the form of the Cyanide-Free Rhodopi/Bulgaria
coalition. The coalition was originally formed by a handful of environ-
mental NGOs of varying size and specialization: Environmental Associa-
tion “Za Zemiata,” Federation “Green Balkans,” Balkani Wildlife
Society, Eko-forum, Center for Environmental Information and Educa-
tion (CEIE), and Ekoklub 2000, as well as the Initiative Committees in
Krumovgrad (Life for Krumovgrad) and Popintsi, and independent
experts concerned with the potential effects of the projects. Other groups
have joined since, but these founding groups remain at the core of the
coalition.
By organizing a campaign—often an issue campaign—at the national
level, environmental NGOs can assist local groups in organizing, iden-
tifying potential points around which to mobilize, and initiating action.
A campaign also helps individual localities leverage their cases to issues
of national importance by linking them to broader causes. Furthermore,
the connections provided by a campaign allow local groups to utilize
NGO knowledge about and links into governing institutions. The
Cyanide-Free Bulgaria campaign has served these purposes for all three
gold-mining cases, although NGO engagement on behalf of Chelopech
and Krumovgrad has been more long-standing and farther reaching, in
part because of the different local dynamics and relatively quick success
of the Popintsi case.
One of the strongest roles of movement actors in cases of transna-
tional investment is their ability to mobilize their connections to trans-
national-level actors and develop strategies to put pressure on both the
state and the investor. More than one of the organizations in the coalition
has close ties with Central and East European Bankwatch, a nongovern-
mental network headquartered in Brussels that tracks investments by
international fi nancial institutions. Bankwatch, in turn, has ties to some
EU representatives and offi ces. Both the coalition and Bankwatch have
mobilized allies and pressed the concerns about the Chelopech and Kru-
movgrad investments in transnational arenas, particularly in the NGO
community, the environmental media, and international institutions.
National Political Actors and Institutions
In addition to movement actors, several other actors affect the outcome
of investment decisions with environmental implications—key among
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