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To this day, our country does not have effective systems for the citizen's participation in decision-making processes concerning the development of lands with undisturbed natural complexes. There are no established traditions, and even legislation regarding these questions is insufficiently substantiated. At the same time, there are laws providing for ac-tive participation of citizens, for example: the Federal Law (FL) "On Environmental Impact Assessments", "Statute on Environmental Impact Assessments" of 2000, plus other nor-mative acts, yet more often than not, in practice, they are not implemented. The situation becomes complicated by the abolishment of the federal environmental protection structure and added to this is the ten-fold reduction of the workforce within this sphere.

The development of lands within relatively undisturbed territories creates great social problems, linked with the destruction of the traditional ways of life of the local population. Local young people, brought up in the traditional ways of their society, quickly fall under the influence of temporary workers, who very often are the apparent bearers of antisocial behavior. At the same time, the absence of authentic information and appropriate experi-ence interferes with the adult populations' ability to orientate themselves quickly to new conditions and to become informed participants in the processes taking place. Sidelining citizens from participating in the decision-making process creates a situation whereby constructive comments and suggestions of the local population and NGO's are left without serious consideration of their essence, or either dismissed entirely. Even with present leg-islation, the population of the lands where development is proposed still has many possi-bilities to affect the process of the development of their land, but no one is able to make use of these opportunities. The result is that after each large building project or raw mate-rial extraction, what is left is a land pillaged, a zone of utter environmental catastrophe, and furthermore the local population, in the most part unemployed, is abandoned to the mercy of fate.

The reason for this cannot be blamed only on the inertia of the local people. There exist a large number of active citizens aware of the necessity of their participation in making im-portant decisions about the problems of the development of their land. The main problem lies in the fact that these citizens are not organized, they don't possess the appropriate knowledge, they don't have access to information or resources to pay for the services of a lawyer and they have no opportunities to consult with the relevant interested specialists.

Activities

In view of the aforementioned, in developing ideas of citizen's control, we are undertaking citizen's monitoring of development of the land containing natural complexes in the Pribai-kalsky region. We defined the aims and tasks of citizen's monitoring, and in view of the fact that there are no ready recommendations; we started to work out for ourselves the methodology and methods for its execution. In this way, at present, we define for our-selves what, in particular, might be considered an indicator for the changes occurring in diverse situations, and how we might monitor these changes and fix their dynamic.

Conditions in the Pribakalsky area are characterized by valuable natural complexes, sub-ject to special protection. There are territories of traditional land use of the native and mi-nority peoples of Siberia, and include the intensive development of land of virgin and un-spoiled parts of Taiga. In this way, we must plan and work out three directives in conduct-ing citizen's monitoring, each of which has its own specifications. For the next 1-2 years we are preparing to lay the foundations of citizen's monitoring of intensive land develop-ment of natural territories, and to test them in practice in working with large developers of the oil, gas and timber industries.
After that, independently, or with other NGO's we will produce and publish methodological recommendations on how to conduct work in this area during citizen's monitoring. At the same time as doing this, we are already conducting preliminary work in laying the founda-tions of monitoring in the protected territories and territories of traditional land usage.

At the moment we are involved in the citizen's monitoring of the development of natural complexes that come under the influence of the Kovykta gas and gas condensate field. We are conducting citizen's hearings about with the project to develop this field as well as the construction of a gas pipeline, and we are conducting citizen's environmental impact assessments of the development of adjacent territories and we are publishing articles on this question in the press.

In order to conduct citizen's monitoring of environmental and social processes, linked with the development of the gas field, it has been decided to conduct work in four different ways, in particular:

• Collect information about the conditions of natural complexes of the territories, , process it into electronic form and create a database on the Geographical Infor-mation Systems network;
• Organize inter-regional citizen's environmental inspection to conduct ongoing raids to disclose infringements of environmental protection legislation in territo-ries coming under the influence of the gas field and the building of gas-pipelines
• Conduct citizens environmental impact assessments (and, when necessary, civil hearings) of development projects of territories coming under the influence of the development of the Kovikta gas and condensate field and oil and gas pipeline construction;
• Carry out consultations and organized support for local people, who are taking part in the work to protect their wildlife by the cultivation and the implementation of environmentally well-founded land use on territories adjacent to the field, road and gas pipeline.