The creation of the Catalan Nature Agency is on track to lead one of the longest known administrative processes. Approved by Parliament on July 2, 2020, entry into service has been accumulating delays, and now the new horizon to complete its processing is 2025. One of the reasons for these delays is the slow bureaucratic pace with which work is done in the preparation of the statutes that must define the way of functioning of its board of directors (an essential requirement for the agency to start working).
The process has been going on for more than three years. Yesterday the DOGC published the decree with these statutes, which continue to encounter strong resistance from various rural and agroforestry social sectors.
The Nature Agency was approved by a large majority in Parliament with the fundamental mission of stopping the loss of biological wealth derived from multiple activities and an intensive use of resources. The functions entrusted to the new entity are the planning and formulation of policies to improve nature conservation.
Its legal nature will make it more agile (it will be able to hire staff more easily) and, in addition, it will have new financial resources, including the natural heritage fund, which will be nourished with half of what is collected from the tax on CO of cars implemented by the Change law.
However, its implementation continues to be delayed, a slowness that the Government attributes to internal bureaucracy problems and to the fact that it has tried to reach a consensus with the rural world, which is critical of the content of the statutes. Ecological sectors attribute the delay, on the other hand, to the lack of political leadership to complete this process.
As it was approved in 2020, the Parliament found a deadline of one year for the entry into force of the law, the forecast that in those 12 months the operating statutes would be pushed forward. This term expired in July 2021, and it was now, two and a half years later, when the Catalan Government made these statutes public (yesterday Friday).
“After more than three years, we see that the planned deadlines continue to be breached. And this happens despite the fact that at the time more than 260 organizations claimed to Parliament the need and urgency to create the Nature Agency”, points out Sandra Carrera, coordinator of the Nature Conservation Network (XCN) . Carrera highlights the negative effects that these delays are causing on natural spaces, which are already insufficiently funded. “We continue without a structure that centralizes and leads conservation policies in an agile and effective way and that has budgetary independence, as required by the Nature Agency law and the Climate Change law,” laments Carrera. The XCN has repeatedly criticized that the resources of the CO2 tax on vehicles are not being properly channeled towards nature management, “but that they are in the hands of Agriculture”.
The agency collided from the first moment with the rejection of sectors of the rural and local world and the forest owners. All of them claim that the new entity will entail new guardianships, controls and excessive interventionism on forestry activity, and they fear a sharpening of “protectionist” policies.
Likewise, they have been relentless in their criticism of the agency’s board of directors. They aspired to have significant or equal representation in this board of directors; but their presence is comparable to that of other social sectors (two representatives of the local world and one of the forest property, in a body of 19 members with a majority of representatives of departments of the Generalitat). The Consorci Forestal de Catalunya, the Catalan Federation of Forestry Associations (Boscat), town councils and the País Rural platform have kept the flame alive against the agency.
In an attempt to seek consensus, then councilor Damià Calvet promised to improve the representation of these sectors in the governing bodies of the agency. However, the promise has only been partially fulfilled, in view of the decree with the statutes that were made public yesterday. His participation remains the same in the board of directors, since the composition could not be modified because it is defined by law. Instead, they have been granted a generous presence in the social council, an advisory body, although their opponents see this as an irrelevant concession.
Marc Vilahur, general director of Environmental Policies and the Natural Environment, defends the participatory process carried out to draw up the statutes. “We have tried the maximum consensus and the bonds of union. Much of the rural world has reacted favorably to the statutes. With some part we have achieved a rapprochement, but there is another that maintains its antagonistic position”, he adds. In this participatory process, ten sessions were held, with 300 contributions, of which 75% were incorporated.
Vilahur specifies that it was not possible to change the law, as the agroforestry sectors claim. “The law is legitimate; it is what it is Reopening the debate would have called into question a law approved by Parliament by a very large majority,” he says. He also underlines the importance of the social council, responsible for ensuring the good management of the agency. “It is not a decision-making body, but it will be able to issue reports that question the operation of the agency and that can be transferred to the”.
The Government reported at the time that it would process the decree of the statutes at the end of 2022, a forecast that was not fulfilled. Now, the statutes of the
