An organization that has worked on environmental rights in Tuzla since 2001 convened a Summer School on artificial intelligence. The continuity is the point.

The Center for Ecology and Energy has spent twenty five years in Tuzla working on air quality, waste management, energy efficiency and the right of citizens to know what is being decided about the places they live. On 17 and 18 August 2026, it convened a two-day Summer School on artificial intelligence for high school students from the region.

That is a shorter distance than it appears.

Where the decisions already are

The Summer School was delivered under the regional Civic Agency in Artificial Intelligence initiative, and it began from where participants already stand rather than from the technology itself. Students examined how AI systems function and, more to the point, where algorithmic decision-making already operates around them: in education, in the information they encounter, in services they use without particular thought.

Sessions addressed bias in automated systems, the handling of personal data, the circulation of misinformation, and the question of accountability when a system produces an outcome rather than an identifiable institution. Participants also worked through the risks of uncritical reliance on AI tools, including in their own schoolwork, and discussed the role young people can play in shaping more responsible and democratic approaches.

The format was interactive throughout, built on discussion and practical examples rather than lectures. Participants were asked to bring their own encounters with these systems into the room.

Why an environmental organization

The Center for Ecology and Energy hosts the Aarhus Center Tuzla. The Aarhus Convention, the international treaty that gives the network its name, rests on three procedural rights: the right of citizens to obtain information about decisions affecting the environment, the right to participate in making those decisions, and the right to challenge the outcome. Bosnia and Herzegovina became a party in 2008, and civil society organizations across the Western Balkans have spent the two decades since building the practical capacity to use those rights.

Those three rights describe the open questions in AI governance almost exactly. What can a person find out about a system that assesses them? How do they take part in decisions about whether and how it is deployed? Where do they turn when the outcome is wrong?

This is not an analogy stretched to fit. It is the same procedural architecture applied to a different category of decision, and it explains why capacity built around environmental governance transfers to digital governance without needing to be rebuilt from scratch. Organizations that have spent years pressing public authorities for information, and contesting decisions when the answers were inadequate, are not starting over when the decision-maker becomes an algorithm.

The timing

Bosnia and Herzegovina signed the Council of Europe Framework Convention on Artificial Intelligence and Human Rights, Democracy and the Rule of Law in December 2025. Its Law on Personal Data Protection, aligned with the General Data Protection Regulation and containing provisions on automated decision-making, entered into application in October 2025.

Procedural rights are being written into AI law across Europe. Rights on paper become rights in practice only when people know they hold them and how to use them. Legislation does not create that constituency. It is built through the slower work of education, and it takes time, which is why it is worth starting with people who will spend their working lives inside these systems.

What the Summer School was for

The objective was not to produce AI experts. Very few of the participants will become engineers, and the initiative does not depend on them doing so.

The objective was narrower and more durable: informed, critical citizens who can recognize an algorithmic decision when it affects them, ask a useful question about it, and take part in decisions about how these technologies are used in their societies. The future of artificial intelligence will be shaped by developers, companies, governments and regulators. It will be shaped better if the people living with the results have a voice, particularly the generation growing up alongside the technology.

Background

The Summer School in Tuzla forms part of Civic Agency in AI Governance, a regional initiative developed and supported by the Open Society Foundations – Western Balkans. Summer Schools and related activities are being implemented with partner organizations across the region, creating spaces for young people to develop the knowledge, critical thinking and confidence to ask the right questions about technologies that will increasingly shape their lives.

The Center for Ecology and Energy is a non-governmental organization established in Tuzla in 2001. Its work spans environmental protection, energy efficiency and renewable energy, responsible waste management, and advocacy on policies affecting the environment. It hosts the Aarhus Center Tuzla, which works to improve implementation of the Aarhus Convention and to connect public authorities with the wider community at local level.

OSF-WB thanks the Center for Ecology and Energy, the experts and teachers who delivered the Summer School, and the participants for their curiosity, their openness, and their willingness to ask difficult questions.