Why Environmental Policies Fail on the Ground

Q1. To begin, could you briefly describe your professional background and the roles you’ve held across environmental management and municipal governance?

If I look back at my career, it hasbeen shaped by more than twenty years of working at the intersection of environmental protection, waste and water management, and public administration. What has been consistent throughout is that I have always been close to both decision-making and delivery. I have held senior political roles, but I have also been directly responsible for municipal systems, infrastructure projects, and day-to-day implementation.

I have worked at the local, national, and regional levels, allowing me to follow environmental policy through its entire lifecycle. I have seen how ideas are shaped politically, how they are translated into laws and strategies, and then how they actually play out when municipalities try to implement them with real people, real budgets, and real constraints.

At the municipal level, I served as Deputy Mayor of Herceg Novi, where I was responsible as Project Manager for the Water Supply and Sanitation Adriatic Coast Programme, a project worth forty-five million euros. That role involved coordinating multiple companies and stakeholders and overseeing the implementation of wastewater treatment plants, sewage networks, water…