The workshop took place in Brussels on Thursday, 15th February 2024 and provided an interactive platform to discuss, brainstorm, and shape the future of marine governance in the EU, Norway, and the United Kingdom (UK). The workshop brought together around 50 key individuals from research, policy making, industry and civil society as well as partners from the PERMAGOV project. Coming from across Europe and spanning multiple European Sea basins, participants engaged in discussions related to marine energy, biodiversity, transport, and plastics. Workshop sessions explored the PERMAGOV Multi-layered Collaborative Marine Governance Model, governance arrangements, institutional barriers, collaboration dynamics, and e-governance.
The specific objectives of the workshop were to:
Provide an overview of European marine governance arrangements and engage in a critical discussion with stakeholders about the dimensions and linkages of said governance arrangements.
Apply a diagnostic tool to identify institutional barriers to these governance arrangements.
Offer an overview of e-governance approaches and co-assess their potential in terms of usability for stakeholders, potential to support the achievement of EU Green Deal objectives, and applicability to help overcome identified institutional barriers.
Critically engage with PERMAGOV research on policy barriers identified to date and to review initial findings with a diverse group of experts.
Introduce and further co-develop a Multi-layered Collaborative Marine Governance model by building on stakeholder insights and expertise.
About PERMAGOV
The overarching aim of the PERMAGOV project is to help improve the implementation and performance of EU marine policies to reach the goals set out in the European Green Deal (EGD). Key to this is identifying critical institutional barriers to effective policy implementation and proposing opportunities to enhance the design and implementation of EU marine policies. To achieve this, PERMAGOV developed a Multi-layered Collaborative Marine Governance (MLCMG) model. This conceptual model brings together different components to help researchers, practitioners, and stakeholders to better identify and understand enabling and constraining governance conditions for the successful achievement of the EGD objectives.
The components of the MLCMG model include governance arrangements, institutional barriers, collaboration dynamics, actor capabilities, and e-governance. Decision making and implementation of marine policies is effectively a collaborative process that can be structured along these components. Merging existing scientific theories and approaches, the MLCMG model and has been developed to be applied to the four PERMAGOV regime complexes (Maritime Transport, Marine Life, Marine Energy and Marine Plastics). In practical terms, the MLCMG model offers a means to help understand how marine governance arrangements change over time, by offering a framework to identify and categorize information, and to help highlight how specific components contribute to change. The PERMAGOV Stakeholder Workshop is an integral part of the PERMAGOV mission towards collecting real-world insights and expertise to advance the project’s research goals and policy impacts.
Workshop approach
The PERMAGOV Stakeholder Workshop aimed to create an interactive space and elicit feedback and discussion amongst all participants. The workshop first offered an introduction to the PERMAGOV project and an overview of the MLCMG model, while following sessions focused on select components of the model, namely governance arrangements, institutional barriers, collaboration dynamics, and e-governance. A final session was then used to ‘return’ to the MLCMG model and offer a comprehensive discussion, building on the specific previous sessions. Participants were divided into four main groups, based on the PERMAGOV Regime Complexes: Maritime Transport, Marine Energy, Marine Life and Marine Plastics. Each group included a diverse group of participants working on these topics, including project partners and invited guests. As outlined in this summary, the different sessions employed a variety of approaches to foster discussions across the session topics.
