Danube Watch 3/2019 - Talking with Two ICPDR Dinosaurs

Wolfgang Stalzer, two-time Head of Delegation and President of the ICPDR, as well as current Goodwill Ambassador and Ivan Zavadsky, current Executive Secretary of the ICPDR and former Head of Delegation of Slovakia, sat down with Danube Watch to discuss the formation of the ICPDR from their first-hand experiences. After 25 years since the signing of the Danube River Protection Convention, the fact that the ICPDR was formed and that it has worked as successfully as it has over the years is surely a special case. In this first instalment of our multi-part sit-down with Mr. Stalzer and Mr. Zavadsky, they focused on the special circumstances in the world that led to the signing of the convention and the creation of the ICPDR.

To begin with, the timing of the drive to create a convention that would bring the ICPDR into reality was certainly exceptional. Following the fall of the Berlin wall in 1989, the subsequent erosion of the Eastern Bloc and, in 1991, the collapse of the Soviet Union dramatically changed the state of the Danube River Basin. “What was most essential was the opening up of the entire Danube catchment area to a collective view of water protection along with the beginning of meaningful collective work regarding the collection of data and the use of uniform and comparable methods within the entire region right up to their implementation”, explains Mr. Stalzer, “and that was very favourable around the time of the fall of the Iron Curtain”.

We hope these personal insights into the beginnings of the Danube River Protection Convention and the ICPDR were as entertaining to read as they were for us at Danube Watch to listen to! But we are not done yet. Mr. Stalzer and Mr. Zavadsky provided us with a wealth of memories and experiences that we plan to share in future instalments. Look to future Danube Watch issues to read about the particular modus operandi of the ICPDR that has made it successful. We will also focus on the individuals who made ICPDR a reality and Mr. Stalzer's and Mr. Zavadsky's personal connections to the Danube.

“This process led to the idea of cooperation after the political opening. It led to having a very strong, stable, efficient mode or model of international cooperation, which is the ICPDR”, adds Mr. Zavadsky. “The effect was that the legislative, institutional and management frameworks for water protection in those former Easter-bloc countries improved dramatically. At the same time, the capacity of individuals grew; water managers, scientists, NGOs, everybody”. Expanding on this, Mr. Zavadsky emphasised that “this improvement was not only about assistance flowing West to East, North to South or from older member states to newer. Rather, it all worked as mutual enrichment, and still does! No one is working in water management in the region without having in mind what the impact on the whole region and on the other member states will be. This is very unique and has been very successful, also largely due to the support and understanding this concept has at the highest political levels”.

The importance of the Danube Environmental Programme, which worked with the World Bank, already having set some instruments in place helped to make their expansion less difficult. “Indeed, there were really two instruments working parallel to each other to achieve this end result”, explains Mr. Stalzer. “One was the practical work toward the realisation of collective water protection, from the experts to the execution of studies and the assessment of priorities, etc. That was the practical side, and that was unbelievably helpful for creating understanding and for engagement above all. The other side was the legislative handling regarding the convention. This was difficult because there was very real competition between the different established state control-systems which imagined the activities of practical implementation before there were legislative conditions in place and really worried that through these practical implementations, mechanisms would be put in place that would hinder basic regulatory measures”, clarifies Mr. Stalzer.

Wolfgang Stalzer
Intimately close to the waters of the Danube since childhood, bathing and fishing along the banks of the river, Wolfgang Stalzer's career naturally followed a path to water management and international water conservation. Its singular high point? Twice sitting as Austria's ICPDR president in 1998 and 2012. In 2014, Stalzer was also made one of the two first ICPDR Goodwill Amabassadors.

The need to soothe the concerns of those working in established state water-related control-systems was far from the only difficulty faced that fortuitous timing helped to solve. The debate among parties to the convention about the extent of the convention's focus was strong. Other river conventions had decided to place their focus on the main stem rather than the basin as a whole, and here too some countries pushed for something similar. “At the very beginning of the convention we had this discussion”, recalls Mr. Zavadsky. “It must be said that we somewhat inherited the Bucharest Declaration, which was a good attempt before the Iron Curtain fell to get some cooperation on water quality going, and everybody welcomed that and was committed. But when the political arena was opened and we started to prepare the convention, it was a really big discussion about whether it would focus only on the main stem. The main driving force at that time was the existing members of the EU because they realised that if the convention were limited to the main stem, there would be trouble later on”.

Mr. Stalzer touches on some of these potential issues by clarifying that “the primary pressures on the river come from the areas away from the main stem. They come from the agriculture and industrial sectors and from populated centres that would not have fallen under the convention's purview and so we would not have been able to really do much to confront the real source of the Danube's issues”. Luckily, a very short time prior, in 1992, the Helsinki Convention set up a solid precedent for what the Danube River Protection Convention would seek to establish. Mr. Stalzer explains: “The Helsinki convention is based on UN legislation and was the first water protection convention that covered large border-crossing river areas. It showed that such an international scope could certainly be achieved”.

Remembering the moment that the decision was finally made, Mr. Zavadsky tells that “the German minister, Klaus Töpfer, invited all the other ministers to Munich and was able to get all of them to agree that the Convention needed to be a modern one and one that respected the needs of proper water management. To that end, it was decided that the river basin was the only management unit under which we could cooperate”. “We were also lucky that our effort to get this water protection issue in order in our basin ran parallel to the 15 years EU water declaration and accession negotiations”, adds Mr.

Ivan Zavadsky
Born on the Slovak banks of the Danube, Ivan Zavadsky came from a family of water managers. A vital part of his home country's EU accession process, and one-time project manager of the foundational Danube Regional Project – a key precursor to the ICPDR – Zavadsky has been our Executive Secretary since 2013.

As for how quickly the convention was ratified and how quickly the ICPDR was able to get to work is another special set of circumstances. Mr. Stalzer relates: “The convention was signed in 1994, and at that time there was a programme running and in this situation, to get a quick start of the activity on the Commission work, Austria invited the Commission to have an Interim Secretariat in Vienna. And due to the fact that the Danube Convention is based on the Helsinki Convention, as a UN convention, it was possible to have the seat of the Danube Protection Commission within this building (UNO-City in Vienna). And in the beginning, this was with the great support of Austria, also financially”. Mr. Zavadsky adds that “this was very important that the Permanent Secretariat got its seat in Vienna because we were able to keep the momentum and the high point of awareness going. An Interim Secretariat and an Interim President were put in place so that as the countries were doing their jobs getting the Convention ratified on the national level, there were people here! They were working on progressing everything forward. Before the Convention had been ratified or had the legal right to do anything, this Interim President and Secretariat were coordinating everything with the support of all of the countries. This really helped to speed up the ratification process”. “There were at this time regular meetings, twice a year, of the Danube Environment Programme,” remembers Mr. Staltzer, “and each Convention country had representatives at these meetings. These representatives to the Programme were at the same time the provisional delegates representing their countries in the Interim Secretatiat. They had back to back sittings and so were also able to already establish what would be the rules of procedure. By the time the Convention was ratified, everything was already up and running!”