CEP made the conscious and early decision in development of the TDA, NAPs and SAP to stress equal importance to process and the final products themselves. Country involvement, dialogue and commitment were set as paramount goals.

3. TDA/NCAP/SAP Process
• CEP made the conscious and early decision in development of the
TDA, NAPs and SAP to stress equal importance to process and the
final products themselves.
• Country involvement, dialogue and commitment were set as
paramount goals.
• The final products were truly collaborative efforts, during two and a
half years the following meetings were held:
- Thirty thematic meetings (biodiversity, ICZM, fisheries, emergency
response, etc)
- Five major TDA workshops
- Fifteen NAP workshops/consultation meetings (three per country)
- Two major SAP workshops

4. TDA Barriers
• Fixed perceptions
• Information rich, data poor
• A wealth of anecdotal evidence – a hundred anecdotes are no better
than one
• Institutes with vested interests in promoting a bleak picture
• No national prioritization of the problems and little knowledge of
wider stakeholder concerns

5. NAPs vs SAP
What should be developed first, the National Action Plans or the Regional
Strategic Action Programme?
Developing NAPs first:
• Enables countries to prioritize national and regional (transboundary)
issues together.
• Countries are forced to enter into meaningful inter-sectoral dialogue
and address the key question of resource mobilization at an early stage.
• Countries can commit to and endorse a NAP at the highest level and in
doing take the first step towards collective stewardship of the
environment.
• In reviewing each other’s NAPs countries are better able to prioritize
regional issues and thereby produce a more focused SAP.

6. NAP vs SAP
Developing the SAP first:
• Gives priority to regional problems over national problems, and lays
unfair and untenable claims to limited resources.
• With more than two or three countries Government endorsement of a
SAP is difficult, if not impossible. SAP documents are often adopted at
solely at the Ministry level and do not go through an inter-sectoral
consultation procedure.
• If not supported by NAPs there is no true commitment to the SAP and
retro-fitting seldom works.

7. Combining the NAP commitments to create a SAP
National issues Regional issues
SAP
Regional issues National issues

8. Tools for SAP prioritization
• The causal chain analysis is an excellent tool to show how an issue
should be addressed, step-by-step, bottom-up and to help determine
and shape required interventions.
• Environmental Quality Objectives helps to develop a broad
stakeholder agreement on the priority regional environment issues and
once agreed allows quantifiable targets to be set to meet those
objectives. From there it is a relatively step to define interventions. A
top-down approach.
• In drafting the Caspian SAP both tools were used, first CCA and then
EQOs, with a final analysis of interventions to ensure the common and
specific root causes had been addressed