Projects Approval Criteria

The Armenian DNA has not officially approved a detailed list of sustainable development criteria yet. This explains the accepted practice of project approval when each relevant ministry deals with individual assessment of the project's sustainability aspects and informs the DNA on its decision to support/reject project approval.

Even though the given approach guarantees efficient and prompt addressing the issue of project approval, it does not provide enough transparency and objectivity. Considering both, this fact and the international practices, the Armenian DNA has defined a set of basic criteria for project evaluation, which may later lay grounds for development of an official procedure for CDM project approval.

These basic criteria take into account technical, environmental, economic and policy aspects of the country's sustainable development and fall into the four following categories:

Environmental criteria
- Improvement of air and water quality;
- Efficient utilisation of natural resource;
- Biodiversity protection.

Economic criteria
- Attraction of foreign investments;
- Renewable energy development, energy-saving;
- Sustainable technology transfer;
- Employment generation;
- Development of regional and local economy.

Social criteria
- Full participation of stakeholders;
- Creation of new jobs;
- Services quality improvement;
- Capacity development.

Political criteria
- Effects on national and/or regional priority objectives;
- Effect on sector priority objectives.

For each of the sub-criteria, it is imperative that the project describes possible effects, including mitigation measures in case of negative impacts.