Overcoming the procedures for obtaining a location permit for the Podravska high-speed road project

Roads are important infrastructure facilities that enable traffic accessibility, i.e. they improve the quality of transport communication between people, goods and innovations. The Podravina high-speed road project was designed with the aim of developing Podravina and Slavonia and enabling a better connection between them and the rest of Croatia. Road construction is a complex process that requires a location permit before construction begins. This paper is written with the aim of presenting in detail the process of obtaining a location permit, which is preceded by obligatory preliminary work. Its complexity depends on the type of a road, its purpose and characteristics of the area through which a planned road passes. The Podravina high-speed road is the largest infrastructure project in that part of Croatia and therefore detailed preliminary work is required. This paper describes some types of preliminary work which include geological, geomechanical and climatic tests. The paper presents a project justification study, an environmental impact study, an environmental impact study, a construction and a technical study as well as a spatial transport analysis. Based on the chosen Podravina high-speed road route, a general design was created by using a road design software program “Platea”.

Review of the project of reconstruction of the existing and reconstruction of the second track on the section Hrvatski Leskovac - Karlovac

The Hrvatski Leskovac - Karlovac section is located on the M202 Zagreb GK - Rijeka railway line, which is part of the Mediterranean corridor of the EU core network. The section is currently a single-track line, and represents a bottleneck in terms of infrastructure capacity. The project envisages the reconstruction of the existing and construction of the second track with the reconstruction of the existing stations in order to meet the conditions of interoperability, the transformation of individual stations into stops, and the reconstruction of existing stops. Some of the existing railway-road crossings will be delevelled by constructing crossroads in two levels (underpasses and overpasses), some will be eliminated with the construction of connection roads and some will be reconstructed. The project is currently in the contracting phase of works and supervisions. In the period from 2017 until today, the Ministry of Environmental Protection and Energy (MZOE) Decision was published on the Environmental Impact Study, the Location Permit was obtained, and the Feasibility Study was completed and approved by the JASPERS Mission in the Republic of Croatia.

Overflow: The oppositional life of an environmental impact study in a Senegalese mining negotiation

Since the 1980s, environmental impact assessment has been adopted by numerous countries in the Global North and Global South to evaluate the effects of industrial and mining development. However, as scholars of mining capitalism have suggested, this has become a technology of environmental government that often serves to bolster and legitimize extractive projects rather than improving environmental outcomes or opening space for public participation. Focusing on oppositional uses of an environmental impact study in a mining controversy in Casamance, Senegal, this article examines the work that environmental assessment does, and argues that it can be used as a tool of resistance, extended delay, and debate. Activists and local residents opposed to the proposed mining project highlighted “overflows”—ways in which the document and its strategies exceeded the intention of legitimizing the mine within Senegalese legal frameworks. As both a representational and material object, the study was used by activists to highlight conflicts of interest inherent in the evaluation process, to emphasize errors and flaws in the text, and to fuel alternative predictions about the mine’s effects. This article suggests greater attention to the oppositional lives of bureaucratic processes, and the ways in which community groups draw upon governmentalized technologies to undermine extractive development.