Institutional barriers create obstacles to policy implementation. Many studies have reported on these barriers with reference to European marine contexts. However, the cumulative learning from this body of literature is impaired by terminological and conceptual diversity, and because the literature is dispersed across scientific fields and specialised journals.
We are now publishing a short summary of the systematic scoping review of studies on institutional barriers that limit policy effectiveness in the context of European marine governance. The purpose of the systematic review is threefold:
Develop a typology for institutional barriers
Analyse institutional barriers within the four regime complexes of marine energy, transport, life, and litter
Provide a broad understanding of institutional barriers (e.g. bounded rationality, institutional fragmentation, skewed participation in policy development and implementation etc.) across a range of marine policy settings
The systematic reviewed was carried out according to the guidelines and recommended protocol developed for conducting a systematic scoping review, published by Tricco et al. (2018) and made available by PRISMA.
An important goal of the PERMAGOV project is to improve EU marine governance so that it can better meet the goals and objectives established in the European Green Deal. The identification of institutional barriers represents an important step towards this aim. The review supports the development of a diagnostic tool that will help identify institutional barriers present in different case studies.
Possible pathways to overcome the barriers will be co-developed in collaboration with end-users affiliated with the case studies. As such, the systematic review presented here initially serves to provide a basis for the subsequent research and development work within the project. The full report will be made publicly available in 2024.
