Health and Safety

Asbestos policy is a textbook case of a problem that kills quietly and therefore ranks low: the victims are statistical, the costs of action immediate, and the pressure to act nonexistent — unless someone manufactures it. KAPAZ’s five-step design did precisely that, and its most distinctive move was importing the one asset the region lacked: Bulgaria’s just-completed experience of transposing the EU Asbestos Directive during its own accession, delivered peer-to-peer through the ARC Fund rather than as distant Brussels guidance.

For the GAUSS Institute, KAPAZ was a milestone: its first European Commission grant as lead beneficiary, managing partners in three countries and full EU procurement, reporting and audit discipline — the track record on which its later EU projects, from IOMO-SPO onwards, were built. It also set the working pattern GAUSS has repeated since: evidence first, network second, then policy pressure with the documents to back it.