SOS Tbilisi

Abstract

This article discusses two recent cases of environmental civic participation in Georgia involving resistance to development projects and the attempts to protect public space in the capital city of Tbilisi—the cases of Vake Park and “Panorama Tbilisi.” Despite their distinct lifecycles and levels of policy success, the two cases illustrate the same challenges to environmental civic participation in Georgia. The top-down challenge derives from government officials’ reluctance to involve outside actors in environmental policymaking and their strategy of labeling environmental activists as politically biased and controlled by the officials’ political opponents. The bottom-up challenge derives from environmental activists’ limited policy advocacy capacities, in terms of both strategic diversity and evidence-based argumentation. These two challenges, reinforced by a cultural context of civic participation characterized by social nihilism, work together to encourage the exclusion of activists from environmental policymaking.

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