Environmental defenders’ knowledge is essential to democracy

Публикувано от:

BlueLink 14-07-2026.

Environmental defenders are not merely vulnerable individuals requiring protection: they are knowledge producers and governance actors whose work helps make environmental rights usable in practice. This was the central conclusion presented by BlueLink Executive Editor Pavel Antonov, PhD, on 14 July 2026 at the RUTA Association’s annual conference in the Ukrainian Carpathians.

Antonov’s work-in-progress study found that Bulgarian defenders experience interconnected legal, administrative, media and digital pressures—and respond by combining law, independent knowledge, public communication, technical protection and solidarity.

These findings matter because pressure on defenders can weaken more than individual activists or organisations. By obstructing access to information, discrediting independent expertise and making public participation costly and exhausting, it can damage the wider infrastructure of environmental democracy.

Antonov (pictured lec presented the paper Defending the Defenders: Rooted Knowledge and Collective Strategies of Environmental and Climate Activists in Bulgaria during a panel on authoritarianism and knowledge-gathering. The panel formed part of the RUTA conference Rooted Knowledges and Dialogues for Change, held from 12 to 15 July 2026.

Authoritarian practices within formal democracy

The conference brought together researchers, artists and activists to consider how knowledge changes when it is rooted in the places and communities it describes. Its programme challenged extractive approaches that privilege outside expertise and detachment over lived experience, relationships and positionality.

It also examined the role of rooted knowledge in resisting authoritarianism, imperial violence, disinformation, ecocide and other systems of destruction.

Speaking about Bulgaria, an EU member state, in a panel concerned with authoritarianism was a deliberate choice. EU membership and formal democratic institutions do not automatically exclude authoritarian practices.

Authoritarianism can operate not only as a regime type, but also through practices that restrict participation, obstruct access to information, discredit inconvenient knowledge and increase the cost of challenging powerful political or economic interests.

Bulgaria therefore offers a revealing case of the distance that can emerge between rights guaranteed on paper and citizens’ actual ability to exercise them.

The preliminary findings point to such a gap between formal and usable rights. Defenders reported administrative delay, barriers to information, procedural obstruction, unequal access to legal and technical expertise, costly litigation and SLAPP-type pressure.

A right may remain legally available while becoming too slow, expensive or exhausting to use effectively.

Pressures reinforce one another

Legal and administrative pressure also interacts with the information environment. A dispute over an environmental decision can turn into a reputational conflict. Smear campaigns can reduce public trust in defenders, while unequal media access can prevent them from responding effectively.

Digital monitoring, hostile online campaigns and insecure communications can further undermine coordination. The chilling effect, Antonov argued, is therefore produced by the cumulative interaction of pressures rather than necessarily by one decisive act of repression.

The discussion also connected this pattern to BlueLink’s previous research on tobacco-industry interference. That work has demonstrated that authoritarian effects on public knowledge need not originate only from governments.

Corporate actors can influence which evidence becomes visible, recruit apparently independent intermediaries, amplify uncertainty and present private commercial interests as public concerns. Environmental defenders operate in similarly unequal information environments, in which their locally grounded knowledge competes with well-resourced institutional and corporate narratives.

Learning from defenders—not only studying them

Researchers and institutions have a lot to learn from environmental and climate defenders, Antonov (pictured left) said in response to question from the audience. Gathering their knowlefhe should start early, rather than only after defenders have been attacked or invited to validate an already designed policy, he pointed out.

Defenders develop knowledge through sustained contact with particular places, communities, institutions and environmental conflicts. They may identify harm, procedural manipulation and emerging threats before these become visible to researchers, journalists or authorities.

Their experience also reveals which protection instruments work in practice and which exist primarily on paper.

This requires treating defenders not merely as research subjects, consultees or beneficiaries, but as knowledge producers and research partners. Their involvement should extend to defining questions, interpreting evidence and designing protection—while ensuring that participation itself does not create additional exposure or risk.

The initial evidence also shows that defenders collectively produce practical protection. Participants described combining legal appeals and institutional monitoring with independent expertise, documentation, coordinated storytelling, secure communication and rapid-alert mechanisms.

Effective support must therefore connect legal assistance, media capacity, digital security and solidarity networks rather than treating them as isolated services.

Research rooted in BlueLink’s practical work

The paper emerges from BlueLink’s implementation of BeLIFE, a European initiative intended to strengthen environmental democracy and improve compliance with EU environmental and climate law.

BeLIFE helps individuals and civil-society organisations exercise their rights to environmental information, public participation and access to justice. The project runs from 2024 to 2027 and is led by the European Environmental Bureau with Youth and Environment Europe, Justice and Environment and the Guta Environmental Law Association. BlueLink participates through its membership in Justice and Environment.

The study’s first core data set was developed around a two-day BeLIFE workshop organised by BlueLink in Sofia on 29–30 October 2025. The event brought together more than 30 environmental and climate defenders, lawyers and experts to examine legal, media, communication and digital-security challenges.

The evidence used for the paper includes participatory observation, anonymised participant applications and five reconstructed working-group protocols. The workshop formed part of BeLIFE’s effort to strengthen defenders’ legal and communication capacity.

A second, still developing research strand is supported through BlueLink’s RavniBG Solidarity Fund initiative, How Do We Protect Defenders Online?

It examines digital, communication and media pressure against civic activists through an anonymous questionnaire and planned interviews. Its initial responses provide comparative evidence, but do not yet constitute a dedicated sample of environmental defenders. BlueLink will therefore renew its outreach to environmental and climate defenders as the research continues.

Work in progress

The paper presents provisional findings rather than a representative national survey. The next stage will expand participation by environmental defenders, complete semi-structured interviews, examine selected cases and continue observing trusted coordination practices.

Even at this early stage, however, its central implication is clear: protecting environmental defenders is not an auxiliary human-rights concern added to environmental policy. It is a condition for credible knowledge, accountable institutions and functioning environmental democracy.

The research and BlueLink’s participation in the RUTA conference form part of the implementation of the BeLIFE project. BeLIFE is funded by the European Union’s LIFE programme and co-funded by BlueLink Foundation and the European Climate Foundation. The research strand on digital, communication and media pressure is also supported by the RavniBG Solidarity Fund, funded by the Bulgarian Women’s Fund.

Views and opinions expressed are those of the author and BlueLink Foundation and do not necessarily reflect those of the European Union, CINEA or the other funding organisations. Neither the European Union nor the granting authorities can be held responsible for them.

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Additional information

You can read more about BlueLink's activities within BeLIFE here.

BlueLink is publishing this article and conducting the study as part of the BeLife project, funded by the European Union's LIFE program. It empowers people to use the law to benefit the environment and climate by improving the resources available for environmental democratic rights, building the capacity of environmental and climate defenders, and improving the quality of environmental rights complaints. The information and views set out on the project website are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the official opinion of the European Union.